White Walls: Collected Stories

LIMPOPO

JUDY’S LITTLE grave was dug up last year and a highway was laid down in its place. I didn’t go out to see it: it’s already done, I was told, cars whoosh and zoom by, children sit in the cars eating sandwiches and dogs smile zipping along in the embrace of their mistresses—they come and go in a flash. What would I do there?

In cases like this a condolence letter is usually sent to the near and dear: step lively, so to speak, and get your dear departed ashes out of here, because we’ve got a shock crew on the job, the fires of the five-year plan are burning, and stuff like that. But Judy had no near, no relatives—at least not in our hemisphere—and of dear there was only Lyonechka, and where can you find Lyonechka these days? There is that group of energetic enthusiasts who’ve been looking for him, of course, but more on that later.

Last year was the fifteenth anniversary of Judy’s death, and not knowing anything about the highway, I lit a candle as I always do on that day, set an empty glass out on the table, covered it with a piece of bread, sat down across from it, and drank a toast to her memory with rowanberry cordial. The candle burned, and the mirror watched from the wall, and a snowstorm raged out the window, but nothing danced in the flame or passed across the dark glass or summoned me from the snowflakes. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to remember poor Judy, maybe I should have wrapped myself up in a sheet, lit incense sticks, and beat on a drum until daylight, or shaved my head, spread lion’s fat on my eyebrows, and squatted facing a corner for nine days—who knows how it’s done over there in Africa?

I don’t even remember exactly what her name was: you had to sort of howl in a special way, clack your teeth, and yawn— and you’d said it. You couldn’t write it down on paper in our letters, but, Judy told us, it was really a very sweet, lyrical name, which according to the dictionary meant “a small plant of the liliaceous order with edible tubers”; in the spring they all go off into the hills to dig this stuff up with sharp sticks, and then they bake it in cinders and dance all night until the cold dawn, dance until the huge, crimson sun rises to dance in turn on their faces, black as oil, on the poisonous blue flowers stuck in their wiry hair, and on their dogs’ teeth necklaces.

Whether that’s what they really do over there or not is hard to say now, especially since Lyonechka—in a burst of inspiration further encouraged by Judy’s ear-to-ear smile—wrote tons of poems on the subject (they’re still lying around here somewhere) ; fact and fancy got so mixed up that now, after all these years, you can’t figure out whether shining black people did in fact dance in the hills, joyfully greeting the rising sun, whether a blue river, steaming in the dawn, ever flowed at the foot of those hills, whether the equator curved like a morning rainbow melting in the sky, whether Judy actually did have sixty-four cousins, or whether it was true that her maternal grandfather thought he was a crocodile and would hide among the dry rushes to grab the legs of children and ducks swimming by.

Everything’s possible! Why not? Everything’s exotic over there, but here, nothing but nothing at all ever happens anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

Dances are all well and fine, but Judy apparently managed to grab a scrap of some kind of education somewhere, for she came to us to do a residency (in veterinary school, for heaven’s sake!). We unwound scarves, scarves, and more scarves; wraps, plaid shawls, shawls made of goat yarn with knots and splinters, shawls that were gauzy and orange, with gold threads, shawls of blue linen and striped linen; we unwound; we looked: what was there left of her to reside? There was nothing to reside, much less fight with livestock and swine: horns, tails, hooves, tripe, and abomasum, dung and udders, moo-oooo and baaa-baaaa, horrors! To combat this rough host—only a little pillar of living darkness, a slice of shadow shivering from the cold, with dark brown dog eyes—that was all there was. But Lyonechka was instantly captivated, bewitched, spellbound; moreover, the reasons for this sudden gush of passion were, as were all of Lyonechka’s reasons, purely ideological, a mental tornado, or to put it simply you could say that rationalism was always one of his dominant characteristics.

Well, first of all, he was a poet, and motes of distant countries carried a lot of weight on his poetic scales; second, as a creative individual he was constantly protesting something— exactly what didn’t really matter, the subject of the protest emerged in the process of indignation—and Judy arose like protest incarnate, like a challenge to everything in the world, a scrap of darkness, a coal amidst the snowstorm, tangerine shawls in the fierce Moscow January, almost Candlemas—to quote Lyonechka. As I saw it—nothing special. Third, she was not just black, but black like a stoker, Lyonechka enthused, and stokers were Lyonechka’s favorite heroes—along with custodians, night watchmen, woodsmen, doormen, and more or less anyone who froze in a sheepskin jacket under the cruel stars, or wandered in felt boots squeaking with snow to guard a construction site at night with the bared fangs of its vertical piles, or kept a drowsy watch on the hard chair of an official building, or stood next to pipes wrapped in rags, checking the pressure gauge in the dim light of a boiler. I’m afraid that his notion of a stoker was either unnecessarily romantic or out-dated—stokers, as far as I know, are not at all that black. I knew one once—but we’ll forgive the poet.

Lyonechka admired all these professions as the last bastions of the genuine intelligentsia. Because outside, the times were such—in Lyonechka’s words—that the spiritual elite, no longer able to watch its weak but honest candle crackle and smoke in the foul air of the epoch, had retreated, had turned away, and, accompanied by the hooting of the mob, gone into the basements, the watchmen’s lodges, shacks, cracks, and crevices, in order, having hidden itself, to preserve the last candle, the last tear, the last letter of its dispersed alphabet. Almost no one returned from the cracks: some were lost to drink while others went mad, either on paper or in reality, like Seryozha B., who got a job guarding the attic of a cooperative apartment building and one spring saw heavenly bouquets and silver bushes with sparkling lights in the dark sky beckoning to his ensavaged soul with a portent of the Second Coming, which he went to meet, stepping from the window of the fourteenth floor right into the fresh air, thereby casting a pall on the pure delight of the working classes out to enjoy the holiday fireworks.

Many people flew off into stern, high-minded flights of fancy about pure, princely air, about maidens in green peasant frocks, about dandelions growing next to wooden fences, about radiant waters and faithful steeds, embroidered ribbons and emboldened riders; they sorrowed and saddened, cursed the course of the times and grew significant, golden beards; they hewed birch blocks to carve spoons, bought themselves samovars, grandfather clocks with cuckoos, woven doormats, crosses, and felt boots; they condemned tea and ink, walked with a ponderous gait, would say “A lady, and you stink” to women who smoked, and with a third eye, which opens forth on the forehead after lengthy fasts and mental stoppages, they began to see sorcery and black magic everywhere.

And there were those who ripped open their shirts to free their suffocating throats, tore off their clothes, fouled by poison and pus, and renounced henceforth and forevermore, crying out: Anathema to Augeas and his works, to his wives and his heirs, his steeds and his chariots, his golden stores, and his servants, his idols and his sepulchers!… And, having screamed their fill, they wiped away their saliva, tightened the belts and strings on their bundles and duffel bags, took their children in their arms and old people on their shoulders, and, without looking back or crossing themselves, dissolved into the sunset. A step forward—over the hunchbacked bridge—through the waters of the Lethe—a wood trampoline—darkened air—a whistling in the ears—the sobbing of the globe, quieter and quieter, and then: the world is different, blossoming thistle, spring blackthorn, wormwood cordial, capers shall scatter and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and… Ah, the new stars are so innocent, and the thronging lights below are so golden, as if a burning being had passed by and left traces, his step wide and uneven—golden, segmented worms and shining tentacles wriggle and burrow, and then the cake of an alien city spins, bloody-blue, doused with rum and set ablaze, stinging the eyes and fingers, hissing in the black water, while the sea with its smoking river tongues inches forward into space—a cooling, darkened, sluggish space already covered with a thin film. Farewell, you who were too slow, farewell, you who remain, forever, forever farewell.

And others survived, preserved themselves, guarded against changes, laid low behind the strips of unglued wallpaper, behind the loosened doorframes, under the tattered felt, and now they emerged, honest and old-fashioned, redolent of ancient virtues and devalued sins. They emerged and couldn’t understand, they recognized neither the air, nor the streets, nor a single soul—“this is not the same city, nor is the night the same!” They came out, carrying under their arms valuables safeguarded in their lethargic sleep: decayed novelties, frayed audacities, moldy discoveries, expired insights, amen; squinting, strange, rare, and useless, they came out the way an antiquarian, albino cockroach might emerge from a pile of old newspapers, and the hosts, amazed by nature’s play, can’t bring themselves to raise their slippers and crush the creature, who seems as noble as a Siberian fox.

But that’s now. Then—it was January, a black frost, two-sided, double-lobar love, and the two of them, standing opposite each other in the foyer of my old apartment, gazing at each other in amazement—oh, to hell with them, I should have pulled them apart right away and nipped imminent misfortune and the whole disgraceful mess in the bud.

I guess it’s no good talking about it now.

We forgot her real name and simply called her Judy; as for the country she came from, well, I couldn’t find it in the new atlas, and I turned the old one in for recycling—in a hurry, without thinking, since I urgently needed to buy the recycled edition of Backcountry River by P. Raskovyrov: everyone remembers that those two volumes traded well for Baudelaire, and Baudelaire was needed by a masseur I knew, who knew the fixer who finally helped me to get the apartment, though he ended up creating a lot of bad blood along the way. However, that’s beside the point. But I couldn’t find the country. Apparently, after the usual battles, partitions, witchcraft, and cannibalism, Judy’s compatriots tore apart the hills, the smoky river, and the fresh morning valley, sawed the crocodiles in three, dispersed the people, and scorched the straw huts. It happens. There was a war going on there, that’s the thing, that’s why Judy ended up stuck here with us: no money, no home, and no one answered any letters.

But in the beginning she was just a muffled, freezing young woman who didn’t understand much of anything, who wanted to nurse animals and who believed Lyonechka’s every word.

I knew him well, however. I knew Lyonechka from grammar school, and therefore I could neither trust nor respect him, but as for others—well, I never stopped anyone else from respecting him. All in all he was a great guy, a childhood friend—you don’t respect those kind of people, you just love them—and at one time he and I hurried together through the same iron-gray morning gloom, past the same snowdrifts, fences, and swaying streetlamps to the same redbrick school whose facade was girded with medallions sporting the alabaster profiles of frostbitten literary classics. And we shared the melancholy of green walls and floors smeared with red floor-polish, of echoing staircases and warm coatroom stench, and of stern-eyed Saltykov-Shchedrin on the landing of the third floor—a scary, murky presence who wrote obscurely about a carp which you had to condemn in the biannual exam that bore the purple stamp of the city board of education. This Saltykov was always either “castigating ulcers” or “revealing birthmarks,” and behind his rabid, arrested gaze there arose the bloodied apron of the sadist, the torturer’s tense tongs, and the slimy dock, at which it was better not to look.

Those painted floors, and the muddy carp, and the ulcers, and the hiss of the strap that Lyonechka’s father used to thrash him—all that had passed; the horizon, as they say, was lost in haze, and what does any of it really matter? Lyonechka was now an inspired liar and a poet—which is much the same thing—a small, bowlegged young man, with a head of mutton-blond hair and the round, not fully closed mouth of a skinned rabbit. Friends are like that. They aren’t pretty.

He fought for truth, of course, wherever he imagined it to be. If the coffee in the cafeteria was watery, Lyonechka would run into the Food Inspectorate offices and, saying he was a public inspector, demand an accounting and a response; if the train couchettes were made up with damp linens, Lyonechka would blow up and, banging the walls, crashing through the cars, break in to see the conductor, announcing himself as an inspector of the Ministry of Transportation and threatening to smash this thieves’ jalopy of theirs to smithereens, including the engineer’s cabin and the radio room, and especially the dining car: he’d mash the mashed potatoes and spatter all their borscht with the impact of powerful fists, and he’d bury each and every one of them under an avalanche of hard-boiled eggs. At the time I’m talking about they’d already kicked Lyonechka off the editorial staff of the evening newspaper, where, under the banner of truth and sincerity, he had tried without authorization to add a literary luster to the obituaries:

or

or

or, finally,

Lyonechka was outraged by the narrow-mindedness and callousness of his newspaper colleagues, who didn’t accept his style. He felt that their position was based on poverty of intellect, acceptance of the cliché, lack of inspiration, and persecution of the creative intelligentsia—quite justly, in my view; he deplored their indifference to the Russian word, so powerful and poisonous and yet loving and lithe; he saw their disinclination to expand the limits of genre, and most important—he perceived their dishonesty, their dishonesty and their scorn for the simple, terrifying event that awaits us all, for the trappings of a simple man’s death.

Lyonechka drank tea in my communal apartment kitchen, drawing my neighbor Spiridonov into arguments and shouting matches. Spiridonov had also suffered in the struggle with indifference: the perforated five-kopeck paper piece he invented had cost him an early heart attack, divorce from his wife, expulsion from the Party, and the loss of his illusions. Once a fanatic and now a lifeless, gray-haired man, Spiridonov would show up with tea in a railway tea-glass holder presented to him by his coworkers for his jubilee, set out hard vanilla cookies, and the two of them would grumble and shout at each other. “Dim-witted Hegels… he says to me: Did you substantiate the documentation?… The imagination of a worm… I said, how much metal alone are we throwing under a dog’s tail, these are the Altai Mountains we’re talking about… fly-brains with sclerotic arteries…. All the bus fleets—right? the whole subway— right?” They embraced and cried about all that was pure, fresh, and untarnished, about trust in ideas, love of one’s fellowman, about a simple smile—they cried about a lot of things in those days. Woe is me, oh, ach, alas and alack—as Barkhudarov and Kryuchkov, compilers of a glossary of our native tongue’s sighs, wrote sadly once upon a time. “They’ve done in Pushkin!” Spiridonov shouted ardently: “Ekh, if only Pushkin were here!” “Pushkin will come! We’ll make another Pushkin,” Lyonechka promised.

He laid out his plan to Spiridonov. I’m supposed to be an intellectual, right? said Lyonechka. An intellectual… you know, you’ve seen the posters… the one shown in the back, behind the worker and the peasant woman, wearing glasses just begging to be smashed by, say, a length of pipe or a chunk of cement—the one with a kind of watery, uncertain smile ready to turn into a humiliated smile any second: as if he’s saying, I know, I know my place! The intellectual on the posters knows his place: it’s in the back, in the doorways, at the threshold—and one undrawn foot is already groping backward for the step down, the way back, the path to retreat; that’s the place where they chuck out leftovers, hand-me-downs, scraps, rags, dregs, dribbles, butts, slops, slivers, splinters, mismatches, misreadings, mis-seeings, mis-thoughts. What, you dare to stand up! I’ll teach you! Aha, so you don’t like it… You don’t li-i-i-ke it? Take that, take that, take that! Sic ’im! son of a b—. Now he’s trying to bite, is he?… Look, he’s baring his teeth… he doesn’t li-i-i-ke it. So get the hell outta here! Bastard. Kick ’im, kick ’im out, hey, guys, let’s go, let’s give it to him! Aha, he ran off. Run, run… You won’t get far, ha! And he wanted to talk his way out of it, the louse.

It’s no accident, oh no, it’s no accident that intellectuals are placed in the back on official paintings—posters, that is—it’s not by chance they’re depicted as second-rate, last and least, just like the posters calling for friendship of peoples, by the way, treat black people as second-rate—behind the whites, set back a little. As if to say, friendship is all well and good, but, well, comrades, they’re still black… you know what I mean.

It therefore followed that the intellectual (Lyonechka) and the black (Judy) should be joined in the bonds of matrimony, and this union of the insulted and injured, the wounded and outcast, this minus, multiplied by a minus, would yield a plus—a curly-headed, plump-bellied, swarthy little plus: if our luck holds we’ll get a Pushkin right off; if not, we’ll go at it again and again, or wait for our grandsons, great-grandsons—and going to the grave my blessing will I give!—decreed Lyonechka. “Go for it,” sighed Spiridonov, and left, taking away his jubilee tea-glass holder, on which three silver satellites orbited a pea-sized earth with one lone country on its bulging side.

Lyonechka went for it.

It was the most nebulous possible time for this, it must be said, since it was precisely then that Judy, or whatever her name really was, turned out to have no citizenship status. That is, she simply had no status of any kind—in place of her African homeland a theater of military operations had opened up. One country wouldn’t recognize her, another wanted to expel her, a third invited her to be interned for an indefinite period, and our country exceptionally regretted, shrugged its shoulders, scratched its head, blew the dandruff off its comb, smiled politely, and looked distractedly out the window, but could definitively propose nothing comforting at that given nebulous point. Just be glad it’s no worse.

Aunt Zina, Lyonechka’s aunt, not yet suspecting what a dirty trick her nephew was planning to play on her and her well-being, said to Judy, “Chin up, daughter. Life is hard on everyone.” But her husband, Uncle Zhenya, whose diplomatic career was taking off—and who was expecting appointment to the corner of the African continent opposite Judy’s at any moment, as it so happened—did not approve of contact with the foreign citizen, even though she was homeless. As the hour of the final paperwork on his appointment drew nearer, he became more strict and vigilant, so as not to take a false step in any direction. Thus, he forbade Aunt Zina to subscribe to Novyi Mir, remembering that its poisonous aura had not yet evaporated; he crossed all suspiciously surnamed acquaintances out of his address book, and hesitating, even crossed out a certain Nurmukhammedov (which he bitterly regretted later, when, straining his eyes, he held the page up to the light in an attempt to restore the telephone number, since the guy turned out to be nothing but a car repair swindler); and in the last, crisis-fraught week, he even smashed all the jars of imported food in the house and threw them into the incinerator, including the Bulgarian apple jam, and was already eyeing products from the other republics, but Aunt Zina protected the beet horseradish with her body.

And then, if you please, just as he had brought himself to an unheard of, unbelievable, inhuman ideological purity, just when he virtually glowed, like a good, ripe persimmon—all the pits shine through and there’s not a bruise to be found whichever way you turn it—no, no, no, I am not now nor have I ever been under investigation, I never participated, possessed, belonged, intended, pronounced or met, never even considered, never heard of in my life, never entertained the least thought, never had the foggiest notion; but he rested not day or night, saying: holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, Which was, and is and is to come—at this very moment a boy, a snot-nosed boy, his nephew, scientifically speaking, a near relative, sullies, do you understand, his reputation, compared to which the hermits of Mount Athos are simply delinquents, vandals writing indecent words in elevators, mongrels, sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, and idolaters!

So Uncle Zhenya had a screaming fit and flailed about on the floor. Because of Lyonechka’s matrimonial intentions his career hung on a thread, and in his mind he had already traveled, served his time, and returned, bringing oodles of stuff with him: wall masks, and rugs, and a fuzzy lampshade, not to mention large-scale items. He could already picture how future guests—the ones that might arise five or six years from now— would change from their boots into slippers and peruse the living room in apparent impartiality, their souls in fact racked with envy; how he would then relieve the tension of the evening with jokes: he’d take a Hong Kong rubber spider out of a packet and throw it against the wall—sticking and tearing itself away, and sticking again, the loathsome thing would crawl down, provoking happy cries and frightening the ladies; he envisioned how they would drink tea from a blue tin with a kind of dancing girl in bloomers—a diamond in her nose, and in her eyes, you know, a certain something, a sort of false innocence; Indian tea would they drink, while the small fry would make do with Georgian tea. In short, Uncle Zhenya planned to live luxuriously, to live forever. But God ruled differently. Jumping ahead, I’ll say that after a few glorious months of his African career—which did happen after all—when he visited the national animal preserve where he teased a baboon with a stick, he got distracted and was torn into teensy pieces by one of those African animals passing by. Before his end, however, almost as if he’d had a premonition, as if he were uneasy, he did manage to send Lyonechka a present—the above-mentioned sticky spider; but the parcel took so long to arrive that when it came the spider had expired and it wouldn’t crawl, it simply splatted; it took so long that even the newspapers promising that Uncle Zhenya’s memory would remain forever in our hearts had been handed over for recycling, to return, in the eternal circulation and transformation of matter, as eighty-kopeck wallpaper, the line for which was long and dismal, as if in mockery of our aspirations.

But all this was later. At that moment Uncle Zhenya was still alive and happy. His wife was just what was called for—the daughter of a military man—and the tile in the john was lettuce green, Czechoslovakian, and on the wall hung a balalaika, a sign of loyalty. So his screaming was completely natural and justified.

He screamed at Lyonechka’s father—the right of a younger, but successful brother—for giving who the hell knows what kind of upbringing to his children: Lyonechka, who had failed miserably in the corridors of the press—the pup could have grown into a strong, international sports journalist if he’d only listened to his uncle; Svetlana, Lyonechka’s sister, an undisciplined girl prone to hanging around cafes and riding in cars with God knows whom; Vasilyok, the youngest, a fifth-grade pupil, also got his share, though he was definitely not guilty of anything and had even just taken second place in the municipal skating Olympics. He screamed at his wife, Aunt Zina, accusing her of permissiveness, absentmindedness, self-indulgence, and of the fact that the husband of her second cousin once considered working for the Planning Department, and for that matter the grandfather of one of the former employees of this Planning Department lived next to a peasant who had owned two cows in 1909, and this could be regarded as wittingly dangerous proximity to kulak circles; he screamed at the cat, who with the approach of March looked ever more frequently out the window; he screamed at the custodian, at the radish seller in the courtyard entrance, at the elevator lady, at the cooperative parking lot guard, at the head of the housing office, and even at the hamster living in a cage in the kitchen—and as a matter of fact, the hamster, having listened to Uncle Zhenya, up and died.

Anyway, Uncle Zhenya’s screams were horrible, as horrible, no doubt, as the scream of a falling man slipping into the abyss, who tries to hold on by clumps of grass: the pliant dry soil raises dust and crumbles, and the roots swell, leaving their earthy nest; close, close to the eyes a startled spider or ant has already run out of his little house. He’ll remain, but you’ll fly off, blossoming for a short while like a bird, like a towel, like a still-warm, living bundle swaddled in its own cry; the feet are already scratching the empty air, and the world is ready, spinning and turning, to offer you its fluffy, green, rough bowl.

And I felt sorry for him, as one always feels sorry for those who’ve been beaten to a bloody pulp, as one pities the eyeless people you see in dreams.

Meanwhile, Lyonechka, having ordered Vasilyok to take up the jigsaw and make the shelves on which he planned to place the future Pushkin’s works, applied himself in earnest to Judy’s education, to her initiation into his poetic faith. He couldn’t bring her home, nor to his uncle’s, needless to say, and my communal kitchen, enlivened by the invalid Spiridonov, resounded with Lyonechka’s crazed texts, protests, and toasts.

“Well, what do you want? Tell me! I’ll take care of everything,” said Lyonechka, strewing the standard lovers’ promises, drinking his fill of tea and crunching the invalid’s cookies.

Judy was embarrassed. She wanted to become a veterinarian as soon as possible…. She wanted to be useful and nurse little animals…. Cows, horses…

“Sweetheart, those aren’t little animals, those are large, horned livestock!”

“Horses don’t have horns….”

“That’s fallacious thinking. That’s a fallacy!” seethed Lyonechka. “Horses used to have horns, but they fell off in the process of evolution when the horse came down from the trees in obedience to social demands and went to work for man in the fields, where horns only got in the way. Do you have cows and horses in Africa? And do they hibernate in the winter?” the poet amused himself. And he explained to Judy that the cow, having taken care of her business and seen to the calf, goes off into the forest, digs a hole, and, settling in cozily, curling up like a bun, sleeps until the spring, swept by snow, with a gentle smile, her lovely eyes closed, eyes whose praises have been sung in epics ours and not ours, and she dreams of swift streams, lo, and green meadows scattered with daisies; meanwhile, forming a chain, hunters are already out on the winter hunt with flashlights and red flags; and they poke the snowdrifts with rakes and lift the sleeping cow with oven forks—that’s why we only have frozen meat here. These aren’t any of your plain old zebu.

When the snows melt, Judy dear, we’ll go to the country, to the thick forests and wide fields—the fir trees are dark, their stumps are huge—and you’ll see our northern fauna: curly-headed silky nightingales with blue eyes, white-fleeced sheep with silver hooves who sing wonderful refrains above the fleet waters; and what cats we have, dressed in caftans of ribbed velvet with copper buttons, and what goats—if only you knew— politically literate, tidy, with uncompromising civic attitudes, in steel-framed glasses. And our spiders, our flies—jolly creatures in red boots with gingerbread cookies under their arms—tell her, Spiridonov! Chin up, Spiridonov, let’s drink to the spider.

I can’t say that I liked this evening Sabbath very much, this daily commotion and tea drinking on my tiny territory—I had my own plans for life, and a few dreams: to marry, to move Mama to my place from the suburb of Friazino or exchange my communal rooms for a one-room apartment. Frankly although barely defined, these plans were somehow getting all confused and falling apart; it wasn’t that there weren’t any husbands or opportunities to exchange apartments—everything was there, but it was all somewhat shopworn, squalid, fifth-rate, with cavities and defects, abscesses and flaws.

It was impossible, for instance, to take my suitor Valéry seriously: strong and tall, and ardently admiring himself for these qualities, with the face of a policeman or an executive, Valéry ate a lot of meat, kept weights, springs, a bicycle, skis, and other unnecessary sports thingamajigs at home; his dream was to buy a blue jacket with metallic buttons, but none could be found for love or money. Without the jacket Valéry felt himself to be out of life’s mainstream. Once we took a walk in the autumn along the windy embankment of the Yauza: it was a cold, orange evening, the last leaves were flying about, a clear star shone in the sky, and there was a feeling of winter’s closeness in the air, a feeling of melancholy, of the meaningless, ineluctably nearing New Year; the wind rose and tossed freezing urban dust at us. Valéry stopped and burst into tears. I stood there, waiting through it, looking at the sky and the star in the emptiness. I understood that words meant nothing, that no comfort was needed, I understood that this was grief, failure, ruin: the blue jacket had gone out of fashion, floating by Valéry; like a rosy morning cloud, an ephemeral vision, cranes flying overhead, or an angel in the lunar heights, the jacket sailed off—it had beckoned, agitated, clouded his soul, entered his dreams, and passed, just as the luxurious, colorful, spicy empires of the East had passed, resounding and shining. Having cried his fill, Valéry wiped his rigid Komsomol face with a red hand, and we went on, hushed and sad, and parted at the vegetable store on the corner, never to meet again.

Neither was Garik, a spiritual man, a suitable fiance. Not that the constant searches of his kennel bothered me: the government kept attacking Garik, confiscating his spiritual papers and pictures, taking away his favorite books, and sometimes picking up Garik himself. It’s not that I was scared off by his six children from his former wife—Garik was a kind, loving, sweet, and unusually resourceful young man: he managed to feed the children, and indefatigably bustling about, he somehow quickly resurrected the papers at the same time. But I got sort of bored listening to him—everything was “vineyards” and more “vineyards,” and paths, and quests, and bliss, and the sweetest and not of this world, and yet life went on—a bad life, but the only one around, and his den was full of rubbish, rags, dust, and glue bottles on the windowsills, and meatless porridge in a burned pot, and tatters on a wobbly nail… and could it really be that this, this puny, ugly world, was the one whispered about and promised, proclaimed and presaged when everything began, when the unseen gates opened and the inaudible gong sounded?

To tell the truth, love was what I wanted, and it was there too, because love is always there, right here inside you, only you don’t know whom to share it with, whom you can entrust with carrying such a marvelous, heavy burden—this one’s a bit weak, and that one will tire quickly, and those—you should run from as fast as you can, before they’ve grabbed you like a jam roll on sale near the store Children’s World, slapping down a coin and wrapping up their catch in oiled paper.

Yes, I wanted something… something that would be heavier than Valery’s weights and lighter than Garik’s homespun wings. I wanted to travel or just leave, or talk for a long, long time, and maybe listen, and I imagined an indistinct traveling companion, friend, passerby, and the road appeared dimly: a path at nighttime, the fusty scent of rot, drops from wet bushes, laughter in the dark and a light ahead, a wooden house and a washed floor, and a book in which everything was written—and the sound of the high, unseen trees all night long until morning.

And also… but it doesn’t matter. There was reality: the kitchen, the shouts, the gray stubble of Spiridonov’s beard diving into a glass of tea, the crowdedness and the two of them, this unnatural pair with far-flung plans. We closed the window tight, so as not to hear the distant, needle-sharp, endless, tormenting cry of Uncle Zhenya.

“You know what, old girl,” Lyonechka hinted, “if the fate of Russian letters is dear to you, why not bring the cot out into the kitchen?”

I didn’t want to sleep in the kitchen, or “go out for a walk,” or spend a week in Friazino, and Spiridonov didn’t want to either. But Lyonechka swore, fought, and cursed Spiridonov and me—both privately, as a matter of course, and in poems, for eternity—and bought us tickets to a double feature with news-reels.

Spring was in the air—cold, nocturnal. The wind already droned in the trees, and water flew in the wind, and birds, cawing, bunched in billows in transparent trees, on rusty domes; clear puddles trembled, reflecting the lights of stands selling dumplings, vodka, and meat pies; and alarm, life, and desire breathed, sailed, and ran in the air—common property, unclaimed, no one’s. I shuffled arm in arm with the gloomy, foot-dragging invalid Spiridonov along the crooked lanes, under Moscow’s Muslim moon, and his foot, laced up in a fourteen-ruble, thirty-kopeck shoe, traced a long, meandering line through Moscow, as if plowing the barren urban asphalt, as if preparing a furrow for unknowable industrial seeds. And then, hunkered down in our damp coats in the movie theater, the invalid and I sullenly watched some fleetingly glimpsed factories, pig iron, awkward heroes of labor, tempered iron beams, tractors, record-setting hogs, bald, well-fed people in tweed suits rubbing ears of wheat between their fingers; we watched the stream of ideologically consistent grain flood us; we watched, waiting submissively for the friendship of homeless people to gel somewhere out there in the form of the illegal infant Pushkin, our last hope.

By summer there was still no Pushkin, and my life had become completely unbearable: the international lovers had made themselves at home in my room, they ate noodles straight from the pot, played the zurna, walked around naked, and even tried to start a campfire on the floor on a sheet of metal; for scientific entertainment Lyonechka bought Judy some white mice and a white tomcat; being a convinced pacifist, Lyonechka imposed his views on the cat—he developed a system of enlightening lectures and conducted practical seminars on restraint from mouse eating.

The Hannibals were always short of money. Lyonechka got a half-time job for a while working on a women’s daybook calendar as an ethnic cuisine columnist. But here, too, love of truth did him poor service, because no one at the calendar wanted base truths, critical harping, and exposes, they didn’t want the recipe for May salad to start with the words: “Let’s be frank—there ain’t nothin’ to eat.” They didn’t want missives and sermons like: “Ladies, if you can afford to buy tomatoes at the market, stop and ask yourselves: Have you been living the right life? Where did you sin? When did you take the wrong step, turning from the narrow path of virtue onto the beaten track of temptation?…” And he was fired again, and again he was proud and indignant and immediately picked up a couple of friends, or rather pupils and followers: bearded guys dressed in rumpled clothes, draped with crosses and bells, with wandering smiles and aloof, bovine gazes, and, inviting them home— to my place, that is—he gave them edifying lectures, taught them to choose the unfalse path, and produced as a living visual aid the cat, who, having experienced the power of the True Word, had already become the most perfect Buddhist and had transcended all earthly, ephemeral, and scurrying things.

A warm summer, an emptied, Sunday city—I would go out to wander the side streets, choosing the old, dark corners where it smells of beer spilled in the dust, of cheap stucco, of the wood fences of construction sites, places where shingles stick out of the walls of buildings, and dandelions—no matter how you trample them—innocently and stupidly sprout at the foot of sheds and temples from the time of Ivan Kalita. The grave luster of a church dome in the distance, the meaningless, unceasing rustle of already darkening leaves, fleet coins of sun, rags, and reek around garages, grass in linden shadow and bald earth patches in the courtyards where laundry hangs to dry— this was where I was to live and die, not meeting a soul, not speaking a word to anyone.

Maybe there actually was a certain someone in another city… but who cares, what does it matter if nothing came of it, and now, after so many years, I’ll sit alone and drink a glass of rowanberry cordial to the memory of Judy’s soul, and I’ll look into the candle’s flame for a long time, and won’t see anything in it except a shining petal with a white core, except for emptiness burning in emptiness.

Farewell, Judy, I’ll say to her, you’re not the only one who didn’t make it. I’m done for, too, all the beasts of my breed have scattered to the four winds—they’ve gone beyond the green waters of the Lethe, beyond the glass wall of the ocean, which won’t part to allow passage; those who didn’t pay close attention were shot and wounded, the hunters had a glorious hunt, their mustaches are bloody, and fresh feathers have stuck to their teeth; and the ones who bounded off in all directions in the desperate hope of surviving hastily changed into alien clothes, adjusted their horns and tails in shards of mirror, pulled on gloves with claws, and now you can’t tear off the dead, fake fur. I run into them sometimes, and we look at each other turbidly, as if from underwater, and I should probably say something, but there’s no point in talking. It’s like when someone is seeing you off on a trip and you stand inside the train car behind the unwashed double glass, and he stands on the platform in gusts of night rain, and you’re both smiling tensely; everything has already been said, but you can’t leave, and you nod and draw waves on your palm: “write,” and he nods too: I get it, got it, I’ll write. But he won’t write, and you both know this, and the train keeps standing there, it won’t budge, none of it will start—the jolts of movement, the sheets, the rubles, the neighbors’ chatter, the dark, sickly sweet tea and oiled paper, the dull flash of lampposts on an empty railway platform, the blazing, beaded gold of raindrops in dotted lines on the glass, the sinful, sidelong glance of a soldier, the swaying crush of bodies in the corridor, the shameless cold of the John where the rumble of the wheels is stronger and more demeaning, and your own reflection stares at you from the murky half-dark, close and unflattering, your own reflection—humiliation—destruction… But this is all to come: right now the train is still standing and hasn’t moved, and your smile is strained and ready to slip, to drift into a tear; and in anticipation of the jolt, the end, the last wave of the hand, you move your lips, whispering senseless words; eighty-seven, seventy-eight; seventy-eight, eighty-seven—and on the other side of this deafness he also moves his lips and lies with relief: “Definitely.”

It was then that Spiridonov, who had ruined his teeth on cheap crackers and the damaging effects of the hot water he drank every evening, was obliged to order himself new crowns. The scatterbrained invalid supposed that he was having gold ones put in, but his very mouth was ripped off for a pretty sum as it turned out later. However, the variety of metals in his middle-aged mouth created a rare but marvelous effect: Spiridonov himself began to receive radio broadcasts without any supplementary appliances. Soft tangos floated out from him, distant foreign voices and prayers, soccer matches howled, raging who knows where. He usually worked on shortwave and turned on in the evenings. In the early hours he transmitted all kinds of rubbish, “For all you inquisitive people out there,” or a concert of machine operators’ requests, but the thicker the darkness grew, the more mysteriously the world muttered and laughed, and lights escaped from the gloom, and there were colored lanterns and drums… and water ran somewhere, full of lights. What kind of water and what kind of lights, and what the drums were saying—how could we possibly know?… And at midnight the invalid broadcast in Portuguese, I think. Maybe it wasn’t Portuguese, how would we know? But oh, what a beautiful language! A taut, flat ocean rhythmically beat at the shore in a wave as long as a whip, colorful sails entered the harbor, and stone steps descended to the water, and there was the smell of seashells and boiled rice, and under red roofs stern women sang loudly of flowers, murders, vessels freighted with burlap and lacquered boxes, birds and beads, purple silk and fragrant pepper. Perhaps it wasn’t like that at all—but how could we possibly know if we had never seen it and would never, never, never see it—never, to our dying day, to the squeak of the cheap, painted coffin of wet pine slabs lowered on a hairy rope in jolts, spurts, and last earthly lengths into the sandy autumn soil, loam, red earth… to the last aster, the royal flower, stamped into the November earth, its head bitten off by the heel of a purple-faced, hurried grave-digger? Never, never, sang Spiridonov; never, I sobbed; never, shouted Lyonechka. Time has stopped, space has dried up, people have hidden in the cracks, the domes have rusted, and the fences are wrapped round with bindweed; you yell—and can’t be heard, you look—and can’t lift your sleepy eyelids, there’s dust as high as the clouds, and Pushkin’s grave is grown over with thick goosefoot! cried Lyonechka. O’er summer’s thickened goosefoot dragon-geese go flocking by. Like beasts at first they’ll howl, or stamp their feathery feet and cry. A lonely maid is frightened—bearded dragon-geese fly by, Is that you Ivan Susanin? See me home, dear, or I’ll cry. To our plans there are no limits, the whole nation reaches high; blackened crabs have picked the flesh off of a dead and bloated thigh. Peter’s pinching peppered pickles, pinching pecks of parsnips too; slews of Slavs have sharpened sickles, but can’t figure what to do. Beyond the gates the cold winds blow—the nightingale its teeth has bared; the fiend, sweet home’s ferocious foe, refuses to be spared! The night bird croaks upon his bough, beneath him breaks the cradle slim; and cock-a-doodle-do bewails aloud the six-winged seraphim. God’s little birdie knows no mercy—neither knows he shame; he’ll tear your heart out, eat it whole, and gaily seek his fame. Midst foggy mist a string resounds—the road is all in dust; if life should e’er deceive you, then it’s homeward that you must.

But Spiridonov, deaf to Lyonechka’s decadent poetry, dreamed his own dreams, and his plans were grandiose: some sort of antennas, amplifiers, coils of wire, radio vacuum tubes, musical light shows. Ha! What light shows; he already planned to wire entire imaginary dance halls and stadiums for sound; he fantasized television images, festivals, cross-country friendship races, the investiture of Olympic medals, the erection of congratulatory statues in the motherland—marble to the neck, bronze to the nipple, a full five stories of granite with sword in hand; he was already razing mountains and excavating tunnels, damming rivers, and redrawing the borders of republics, he was already traveling into outer space and from there, his fake gold caps twinkling, his telescopic eyes rolling, huge as King Kong, he would knock down ballistic missiles and establish eternal peace throughout the whole world.

And there was still no Pushkin.

Then the vigilant comrades from the house management committee visited the apartment, led by old man Dushkin, who, if he slipped on the street or the sour cream had turned, never wrote to any less an authority than the Politburo. The comrades wanted to know: Why all the noise and music, and why did the lights burn at night? Your documents, please. Spiridonov took the blame on himself: he was an inventor, he worked at night, the sounds of the zurna and drums stimulated him. He brought out his eighth-grade achievement certificate from boy’s school #415 of the Red Guard region, a publication from Science and Life, “MAKE a handy new MOP from old TOOTHBRUSHES,” and a museum curio: the text of Lenin’s “How We Should Reorganize the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate,” reproduced in encrusted fish bones on a walrus tusk by an unknown folk master. If it’s not allowed, said Spiridonov, then he wouldn’t do it anymore, but his documents were in order, we know the residence rules. We, thank God, aren’t children, we know that everything’s forbidden: we mustn’t stand at night on the side of the Moscow Ring Road, operate without support, pull except in case of emergency, lean over the driver’s cabin, take more than six hundred grams per person, tamper with the packaging, bring a bottle for consumption on the premises, place objects on the handrails, peddle without a license, open before coming to a complete stop, walk without a muzzle, transport foul-smelling, poisonous, or oversized items, talk more than three minutes, descend and walk along the rails, stick our heads out, climb up, photograph, offer resistance, croak, whistle, shout thrice in the dawn like a basilisk, or engage in the sawing of firewood after eleven o’clock at night local time.

It was better not to joke with the comrades from the house management committee. I kicked out Lyonechka’s pupils; the white cat left on his own, having talked the mice into voyaging with him—and that autumn, by the way, they were seen in the upper regions of the Volga; the cat walked, leaning on a staff in a garland of forget-me-nots, aloof; the mice, six of them, ran behind carrying their tiny belongings, salt and matches—I’m afraid that they lit campfires in inappropriate places, and we were to blame; and to add to it all, Uncle Zhenya—who had arrived at his appointed place, and had already strolled through the official rooms of his new dwelling, yanked on the windows, doors, locks, and blinds, checking for sturdiness, unpacked his suitcases with striped ties, checked ties, and peacock feather ties, explained to Aunt Zina how to use the air conditioner (“Zhenya! Hey, Zhenya! I don’t quite… I can’t figure it out!”)—Uncle Zhenya did not relax his vigilance for a second and sent Lyonechka a letter by diplomatic mail with a copy to Lyonechka’s parents, warning that Lyonechka should stop it (he knew what Uncle Zhenya was talking about) and shouldn’t even think of doing any such thing; that someone had already been warned and would follow through strictly, for he had been empowered to do so; and if Lyonechka didn’t turn over a new leaf, Uncle Zhenya would let it be known in certain quarters and then he’d really catch it. And Lyonechka shouldn’t think that just because Uncle Zhenya is in certain places he doesn’t give a hoot. No, it’s all very serious, because—you understand yourself, and especially now, when… well, precisely. There you have it.

Poor Uncle Zhenya—he wrote, he thought hard, and chose subtleties of meaning, but his death had already left the distant forests and, sniffing around, was running to meet him on soft paws, flexing its muscles. Uncle Zhenya finished writing, drank the coffee that was now available, and looked into the empty cup—and all the coffee grinds of the world, all the daisies, palm lines, pictures in distant stars and packs of cards with frowning kings and arrogant knaves had already fallen into the simple contour of a tombstone, trustingly revealing to Uncle Zhenya his imminent fate, but he couldn’t read it, for this knowledge was not given to him. And Uncle Zhenya sealed the envelope and daydreamed of the future’s fruits, of swimming in the sea, of new spare tires for a new car, of official reports and labyrinths of intrigue—he became lost in sweet thoughts of things that eventually came to pass, of course, but that no longer had the slightest relationship to him. It’s strange to think that he died almost at the same time as Judy, and that as he pierced the metaphysical heights, he may perchance have bumped into her in the gray light of otherworldly bodies and not recognized her.

Uncle Zhenya wasn’t joking: he pushed the buttons available to him, and in October—I remember the day: panic, Lyo-nechka’s shouts, Judy’s tears, and in the southern side of the sky that night, the distant, trembling dawn of Uncle Zhenya’s malicious delight—in October Judy was summoned to a certain unpleasant place, an official building, and it was suggested that she be so kind as to get the hell out, go wherever she liked, only get lost. Obviously, we didn’t sleep all night: Lyonechka gave Decembrist speeches, his sister Svetlana, in tight ringlets and heavily made up, ran back and forth from us to her parents (Mama was a real cow, and Papa was even more uncouth) despite the late hour (who knows, what if love were suddenly waiting around the corner) conveying, on the one hand, her brother’s radical plans: to marry, emigrate, leave for the north, for the south, for Mars, contrive an act of self-immolation on Pushkin Square, and so forth; and on the other hand—everything that one expects in such circumstances. When Svetlana informed us toward dawn that a telephone call had been placed to the Southern Hemisphere (they announced that “Lyonia something or other,” and he replied “call so-and-so”) all of us— lovers, Spiridonov, Svetlana, and I—took off in an undisclosed direction, as they say, and fought along the way. Svetlana wanted to head for the sea, since she really liked sailors and the gifts they bring to girls of Svetlana’s life-style; I proposed Friazino, where Mama had a little house, planted around with black currants and lupine; Lyonechka was attracted by the taiga (as usual, for ideological reasons); and as a result Spiridonov won, carrying us off to the town of R., where his sister Antonina Sergeevna was a bigwig in the city government.

Although the authorities in the town of R. lived better than simple people, as the authorities always do—for the May holidays they could sign up to buy marshmallows, Chinese towels, and even Stories of Burma in a colorful binding, and for the November holidays they got to stand on a heated tribune, sincerely waving their mittened hands to the freezing masses— and many simple people dream of such a life while tossing in their beds at night—still, the authorities have their dramas, too, and it seems to me that there’s no point in maligning or envying them from the word go. Antonina Sergeevna, who sheltered us, had to answer somewhere high up in her empyrean for the hot-water pipes, and when the asphalt in the town of R. began collapsing and people started falling irretrievably into the boiling water underground, the empyrean raised the question of Antonina Sergeevna’s responsibility for this unplanned broth. But, after all, the asphalt itself wasn’t under her jurisdiction, it was under the jurisdiction of Vasily Paramono-vich, and a stern warning should be issued to him, claimed the angered Antonina Sergeevna, slapping her palm on the light-colored, polished table in the office, and on the dark one at home. When the people collapsed, Vasily Paramonovich was absent, however—a general had invited him to Naryan-Mar to hunt the kolkhoz deer from a helicopter—and he most decidedly did not care to be sternly warned. He drew Antonina Sergeevna’s attention to his friendship with the general as if it added a lily-white cast to the pure pallor of his nomenclatural raiment; he hinted at such and such and also at this and that, and, deftly summarizing, juggling and shuffling everything, emphasized the fact that had Antonina Sergeevna’s pipes not rusted, the water would not have eroded Vasily Paramonovich’s asphalt. Correct? Correct. While this mutual bickering continued, the water undermined Akhmed Khasianovich’s trees, which fell over and squashed a couple of homeless dogs belonging to Olga Khristoforovna, for whom it was already time to retire on her special pension. Naturally, it was she who bore the brunt of responsibility in the end, since, as she was reminded, the department under her jurisdiction hadn’t shot its quota of ownerless dogs, and during that fiscal period these dogs had insulted the dignity of our people in the public squares and children’s playgrounds, and the dignity of our people is a golden, unchangeable currency, the pledge and guarantee of our continual, unquestioned success, our pride and joy, for it is better to die standing in boiling water than to live on our knees, picking up all kinds of I don’t even want to say what after her undisciplined dogs—mongrels, it must be stressed—and besides, it’s not altogether impossible that it was in fact her dogs that toppled the trees, dug up the asphalt, and gnawed through the hot pipes, which is what led to fourteen people boiling in our dear native earth—not an inch of which will we yield—moreover the Western radio programs are slanderously claiming that it was fifteen, but, ladies and gentlemen, they miscalculated— as always for that matter—since the fifteenth recovered and joined the work brigade of the blind workers’ cooperative that produces Flycatcher sticky tape, and the spurious slander of overseas stooges and the hysterics and yes-men of the right-wing emigres are only fit for the “Gotcha” column of the regional newspaper.

Thus was the true face of Olga Khristoforovna revealed, and without a second thought she ran off on her special pension, in order to resolutely write her battle memoirs, for in her time she had galloped with a cavalry squadron, had known Commander Shchors, and even been awarded an engraved sword, which still hung across the raspberry-colored wall rug with blue zigzags that had been given to her by a Dagestan delegation, and under which, on the narrow bed, covered with an army blanket, her unclaimed spinsterhood languished at night.

By the way, I’d like to note—for the sake of fairness and the bigger picture—that though Antonina Sergeevna acted faintheartedly, sloughing off her guilt in the affair of the boiled citizens of R. (and who wouldn’t have acted faintheartedly?), all in all she remained on top of the situation: she thoroughly understood and appreciated Olga Khristoforovna’s role and her contribution to our successes, to our lofty today, as she liked to say; and although she certainly could have, she didn’t cross Olga Khristoforovna off the Timur Scout’s list of old people, but every October sent her two transitional age adolescents with an axe to chop firewood for the winter. In turn, Olga Khristoforovna tactfully refrained from pointing out that her building had long since switched to central heating and that she didn’t need firewood; she didn’t shoo away the adolescents, but gave them tea with quince jam and showed them how to handle a sword, without a thought to sparing the white geraniums on her windowsill; as a gesture of friendship she even sent them to get cigarettes—she was an inveterate smoker—at a nearby kiosk, which the adolescents then chopped open with the axe around New Year, carrying off four kilos of hard candies and two packs each of cheap macaroni for Mama and Grandma. At the trial they referred to Prudhomme, who taught that all property is theft, and likewise manifested a good knowledge of Bakunin’s works; leaving for the camp, they promised upon their return to apply to the philosophy department, and waved their prison handkerchiefs at a sobbing Olga Khristoforovna.

As a matter of fact, Antonina Sergeevna was a great gal, even though she wasn’t one of us; she had steel teeth, a head of curls, and the nape of her neck was shaved high. “Girls!” she would say to us. “You don’t know how to work, oh, go jump in a creek, the lot of you, what am I going to do with you?” Her jacket was official and inflexible: under it in a rose blouse resided her warm, unembraceable, already rather elderly expanses; she wore a wooden brooch at her throat, and her lipstick was bright, Parisian, and poisonous—we all had a taste of it ourselves when Antonina Sergeevna would suddenly jump up from behind the bountiful table (“the tomatoes! set out the tomatoes!”) and press our heads to her stomach with emotion, kissing us with unabated strength.

Antonina Sergeevna took our motley crew in stride, said that she was very, very, very glad we had come—there was much ado, a lot of work, and we, of course, would help her. R. was preparing for a holiday: they were expecting guests from the Greater Tulumbass tribe, which was a collective sister region of the whole R. region. A three-day friendship festival was planned and the authorities were beside themselves. The undertaking was ambitious: to create all the necessary conditions for the Tulumbasses to feel at home. Plywood mountains and ravines were urgently erected, the string factory wove lianas, and in order to be stained black, a color closer to the heart of the sister region, the pigs were forced to wade twice across the Unka River, which had been noted in a chronicle of the eleventh century (“And the Prince came on the Unka River. And it was wide and terrifying”), but had since lost its strategic significance.

Pushing aside the plates, Antonina Sergeevna immediately laid papers out on the table, and waving away the clothes moths, acquainted us with the heart of the leadership’s arguments. She herself proposed a thorough, comprehensive plan: an international scramble up a smooth pole; a sauna for the chief; a visit to the embroidery factory with gifts of dust ruffles and embroidered towels; a sight-seeing excursion around the city to include the ruins of the nunnery, the house where legend had it another house had stood, and the bakery that was being built; the placing of earth at a friendship tree; the signing of joint protests against international tensions here and there; and tea in the foyer of the House of Culture. Vasily Paramonovich made a counterproposal: a meeting with Party activists; an excursion to the acid guild of a chemical factory; a concert of the voluntary militia choir; the presentation of memorial envelopes; the signing of a proposal to name one of the Tulumbasses an honorary member of the cosmonaut detachment; and a picnic on the banks of the Unka with campfires and fishing. For the dust ruffles he proposed substituting the Urdu language edition of South Seas explorer and ethnographer Miklukho-Maklai’s collected works, which had appeared recently in local stores in unlimited quantities. Akhmed Khasianovich reproached his colleagues with a lack of imagination: all this had been done, he said, when they received the delegation of Vaka-Vaka Indians. Fresh ideas were needed: a mass swim across the river, a parachute jump, or on the contrary, an excursion down into the local limestone caves, but a friendly two-week trek across the desert or the tundra would be best of all; however they’d have to agree on the route immediately and set up stands with lemonade and sour-cream buns along the way. The best gift of all would be a copy of the famous painting The Poet Musa Jalil in the Moabit Prison, since it had everything one could want in a painting: ethnicity, folk elements, protest, and optimism, expressed in the rays of light pouring through the barred window. Antonina Sergeevna objected that, as far as she could recall, there weren’t any windows in the painting, and even if she were mistaken, the prison is depicted from the inside, which could be depressing, and wouldn’t the painting Life Is Everywhere, in which the prison is seen from the outside, be better? The sweet faces of children peer out of the windows in that one, which inspires warm feelings even in unprepared viewers. Vasily Paramonovich, who was not strong on art, said in a conciliatory fashion that the safest thing would be the poster “With Every Year—Our Step Grows Wider,” there are several hundred rolls in the warehouse, we could give a copy to each of the Tulumbasses. They had decided on the poster, but now Antonina Sergeevna wanted to know our opinion, as people more in touch with the capital.

Antonina Sergeevna has to be given credit: Judy’s past, present, and future, her looks, name, bad pronunciation, and clothes, which in their abundance and quality reminded one of the increased production at the Three Mountain Manufacturing plant at the end of the year, utterly failed to rattle her: Spiridonov knew where he was taking us. Judy was Judy, the Tulumbasses were Tulumbasses, five guests or twenty-five guests—it was all the same to Antonina Sergeevna, a woman who thought in categories and documents.

Twilight was already upon us and distant islands awoke in Spiridonov: the ocean seethed, Trinidad and Tobago stirred, a little wind played in the tops of the palms, a coconut fell, the blind coral threw out a new prickly arrow, and seashells opened their gates in the warm murk of the lagoon; and in the smoky dream of a pearl oyster what must have been Paris floated by— in a gray rain, in grape cluster of lights, quivering, Paris floated by like a sweet intimation of existence beyond the grave. Violins squealed like the brakes of heavenly chariots.

“Keep it down, Kuzma,” remarked Antonina Sergeevna, raising her head from the papers and unseeingly glancing over the top of her glasses. “So then, Vasily Paramonovich wants to call in the blimps—he has good connections—and stretch a holiday banner between them—a few sickles, golden ears of wheat as symbols of peaceful labor—the sketch has already been approved by the censors. In this regard, a question for you Moscow comrades: do we need a little slogan or two for the ears, what do you think?”

At the word “slogan,” Lyonechka became politically aroused with dangerous speed, and, noticing the negative symptoms (sweat, trembling, electrical lightning storms of protest in his eyes), we all retreated quietly to the porch.

Early autumn had already crawled into the town of R. and showed itself here and there—sometimes in brown bushes, sometimes in bald patches on the foliage of subdued trees. The air smelled of chickens, the john, and wet grass, the moon rose so coppery and enormous that it was as if the end of the world had already come; Spiridonov smoked and the music of other worlds issued from his mouth, mingled with the smoke; unshaven and lame, elderly and not too swift, he had been chosen by someone to give witness to another life—distant, impossible, unattainable—the kind in which there was no place for any of us. The town of R. was our place, it was as familiar as the back of our hands, known by heart, inside out, whether you went to the right or the left or down into the basement or up to the rooftop and, held up by your slipping feet on the rusty tin and clasping the warm, potato-smelling pipe, cried out to the whole world: to the thinning forests, to the dark blue fog in the cold cleared fields, to the drunken tractor drivers crawling into the tractor furrows and to the wolves gnawing at the drivers’ trousers and neck, and to the tiny country store where there’s nothing but packets of gelatin and rubber boots, to the sleeping beetles and cranes overhead, to the black, lonely old ladies who’ve forgotten how they trembled before their wedding and wailed at coffin’s side; go on, cry out—everything’s known ahead of time, everything’s been trampled, verified, searched, settled, shaken out, there’s no exit, the exits have been sealed, every house, window, attic, and cellar has been explored through and through, examined thoroughly. They’ve touched every barrel, tugged on the latches, driven in or pulled out bent nails, rummaged in the basement corners that are either slippery from mold or dried up, they’ve picked at the window frames, peeled off the brown paint, hung and torn down locks, moved piles of loose, discarded paper; there’s not a single empty, somehow accidentally forgotten room, corner, or hallway; there’s not a chair that hasn’t been sat on; not a single stuffy-smelling copper door handle that hasn’t been handled, a catch or bolt that hasn’t been drawn; there’s no exit, but there’s no guard either—leaving just isn’t in the cards.

But the people who sing noisily in the fire and smoke in the invalid’s illegal mouth—aren’t they also searching for a way out of their own universe, diving, jumping, dancing, glancing from under their hands toward the ocean horizon, seeing off and meeting the ships: Hello, sailors, what have you brought us— rugs? plague? earrings? herring? Tell us quickly, is there another life, and which way should we run to seize its gilded edges?

Svetlana sighed heavily. She suffered because all over the world there were men, unattainable and magnificent, in the mines and in airplanes, in restaurants and on prison bunks, on night watch and under festive white sails, men whom she’d never meet: small ones and big ones, with mustaches and automobiles, ties and bald spots, long underwear and gold signet rings, with pockets full of money and a passionate desire to spend this money on Svetlana—who’s right here on the evening porch, all curls and powder, ready to fall deeply in love with each and every one who asks.

Blending with the darkness, Judy sat silently, like everyone else. She hadn’t said anything in a long time, but only now, when Spiridonov played a solo on his horn, could one suddenly hear how deep, powerless, and black her silence was; it was like the lonely obedient silence of a beast—that fantastic beast she wanted to nurse without knowing or seeing who beckoned with a hoof or claw; wrapping herself in scarves and shawls, she boldly set off into the distance, beyond the seas and mountains in search of that beast, in search of a warm, quiet, useful friend with soft wool, with silly dark eyes, with sparse hair on its face and a secret emptiness blowing from the pitted, rosy cartilage of its ear canals, with milk in its satiny stomach or a column of transparent seed in the curly caches of its loins; a beast with long, spiral horns and a tail resembling a geisha’s hair in the morning, with a silver chain on its neck and a daisy in its carefree mouth, an affectionate, loyal, make-believe beast, imagined in dreams.

I wanted to hug her, to stroke her fuzzy head, and say: Now now, what do you want from us, foolish woman, how can we help you if we ourselves don’t know whom to call, where to run, what to look for, and from whom to hide? We’re all running in different directions: I am, and you are, and so is Antonina Sergeevna, who sweats from her immense government responsibilities, and so is Uncle Zhenya, who’s already far away, southern, almost otherworldly, comfortably wriggling his toes in his brand-new inexpensive sandals, ready to set out on the walk from which he won’t return; and so is the maiden-knight Olga Khristoforovna, who wanted to do what was best, but was cut down by colleagues who wanted to do even better—the moon rises and torments Olga Khristoforovna with forgotten dreams, forgotten fields torn up by the cavalry’s hooves, the hiss of transparent sabers, the smoke of soundless gunshot, the smell of porridge from the collective pots, the smell of sheepskin, blood, youth, and unreceived kisses. Look around, listen carefully, or even open a book. Everyone’s running, running away from himself or in search of himself: Odysseus runs endlessly, spinning and marking time in the small bowl of the Mediterranean Sea; the three sisters are running to Moscow, motionlessly and eternally, like in a nightmare, moving their six legs, running in place; Doctor Doolittle who, rather like you, got lost in dreams of sick, overseas animals, is also running—“and Doctor Doolittle ran all that day, and only one word would he say: Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo!” Moscow, Limpopo, the town of R., or the island of Ithaca—isn’t it all the same?

But I didn’t say any of this, because at that moment the gate jingled and from the dew-befogged hawthorn bushes emerged Vasily Paramonovich, the devotee of the airways, white in his embroidered shirt, arm in arm with Perkhushkov, the regional ideological dragon.

“Who’s there?” Vasily Paramonovich hooted, cheerful and alert, from the twilight. “I’ve come to work things out, I’ve got new plans with me, and then I hear: someone’s misbehaving with music. And is this none other than Antonina Sergeevna’s brother come to pay a visit? Welcome home!”

“What’s that?” said Perkhushkov, roused, sensing Judy’s darkness in the dark. “Don’t tell me the foreign comrades have already arrived? The reservations aren’t till the twentieth.”

And he returned us to the house, where the sight and effect of tomatoes and cognac revived dim historical memories of the Battle of Borodino. “We’re expecting the air squadron by morning,” said Vasily Paramonovich. “Oh, what a celebration it’ll be!”

“But where will they land?” said Antonina Sergeevna, surprised.

“Oh, they won’t land anywhere: they don’t have a permit,” replied Vasily Paramonovich, casting a sidelong glance at Perkhushkov. Perkhushkov nodded. “They’re going to circle and make figures. Tomorrow they’ll rehearse, and then when our sister-regional comrades get here, they’ll give them a real show.”

“Couldn’t we throw red carnations from the fighter planes? Paper ones?” asked Antonina Sergeevna.

“We used up our quota of paper way back in June! Now, then, Antonina, just what we need, more paper.”

“What if we get the private sector in, the ones who knit flowers for the cemetery?”

“Under no circumstances! They knit roses, not carnations, and roses are apolitical,” interrupted Perkhushkov. “You have to understand the difference. In fact, the cemetery is one of our sorest spots and a source of consternation,” said Perkhushkov sadly, “a neglected plot of ideological work, I have to admit. It has a despondent, depressed spirit and a touch of mysticism uncharacteristic of our society: crosses, crypts, and some people even allow themselves to carve pessimistic inscriptions or erect cement angels, which are essentially unmasked subversions of materialism and empiriocriticism. And just think, on the tombstones and gravestones they carve—completely irresponsibly—not only the date of birth, but the date of so-called death, and most of the time neither have been cleared with the proper authorities. It’s just plain cosmopolitanism. That’s why there’s a move now to enter stern reprimands—stern, mind you!—in the dossiers of deceased comrades if mystical figures and unauthorized dates appear on their graves—after all, we can’t allow the Three Sources and Three Spare Parts of Marxism to be obstructed and squandered by a bunch of little cherubims introduced from the outside. And take other problem spots. No need to go far—why right over here, two blocks away, in the old-age home, what goes on there if you just scratch beneath the surface. Gaidukov, Andrei Borisovich: an Honored Worker, medals from armpit to armpit, so many of them that at last November’s holidays they had to add panels to his jacket, thrice laureate of the Blue Sword. He’s completely forgotten himself, hunts rabbits under his bed, shames the authorities. Boiko, Raisa Nikolaevna: you’d think that all the necessary conditions had been provided, they brought her to the political seminars on a hospital bed, camphor—be our guest, an IV—to your health, an oxygen pillow—our pleasure, everything’s right at hand. And then she goes and confuses Jaspers with Kierkegaard, can’t name the seventeen reasons of gradual transformation, and insists that Martin Luther King nailed the April theses to the Berlin Wall! What is this? And Ivanova, Sulamif Semyonovna? Quite understandable if she’d had a bad class origin, but no, she’s a first-generation member of the intelligentsia, a doctoral candidate and everything, and at one time she even invented some kind of syrup for calming the nerves that was very popular at the end of the thirties, so popular that Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin himself congratulated her, stuck a medal on her chest, embraced and kissed her, shook her hands, feet, neck, everything—he greeted her very warmly. This Sulamif became horribly senile—though I suspect it’s not senility but a diversion—and pretends she’s a young, capricious girl, moreover of the most vulgar sort: give her some bouquets of lilac, she says, she’ll wallow around in them, and she wants elves with feather fans to blow zephyrs on her, for example, or—horrors!—siroccos. Can you imagine? This is one of our own Soviet old ladies—and to make such a political error. Friends, honestly now, how could there be siroccos in our country?”

Perkhushkov burst into tears, shaking his head, and Svetlana, drawn to male secretions—even if only tears—like a snake to heat, nestled up against the weakened commissar and set about drying all forty of his eyes with her fair locks, which she had dipped in sugar water for strength and set in strips of the newspaper Red Star the evening before.

And on the whole, said Perkhushkov, plunging into melancholy, how frightening and difficult it is to live on this earth, my friends. What dramas, collisions, hurricanes, tempests, tornadoes, cyclones, anticyclones, typhoons, tsunamis, mistrals, barguzins, khamsins, and North Winds, not to mention shai-tans, occur at every step of our spiritual life. O! Literally this summer, just this August, this very August, Perkhushkov lived through a drama that no pen would dare take up—the Homer has not yet been blinded who could tackle this theme. Hell— Perkhushkov recounted bitterly—was nothing but a party with girls, just an amusement park, to put it mildly, compared to what he went through. That universal fool Dante, who supposedly roamed around the circles of hell with his pal Virgil, would have hanged himself on the spot if he’d had to go through anything like this; he wouldn’t have bothered suffering. From the first to the fourteenth of August—days of mourning, weeks of woe—Perkhushkov suffered the hell of separation from his homeland. Yes. He went to Italy. Yes. He went there in an airplane, and came back—to increase his torment—by train. The result: he went gray overnight (Perkhushkov moved Svetlana aside and showed his gray hair), and bitter wrinkles sprouted over his entire face, ears, and even the nape of his neck.

How to describe it?—after all, Perkhushkov isn’t Homer or Lope de Vega, or even the Pleiades poets. How to describe the loneliness, the feeling of breakdown, the profound, interminable depression? And the oppression which seemed to suffuse the very air? In Italy there’s always a gray, gray sky, Perkhushkov related, low, leaden clouds gather over the flat roofs and press on you heavily, crushing you. The howling wind only slightly enlivens the empty, pitiful streets. Bent low, an old lady will hobble past, a beggar will crawl by waving the bloody stump of a limb wrapped in filthy rags, and then silence descends once again. An occasional snowflake, swirling slowly, falls in the horrifying, stifling atmosphere. Industrial smoke covers the crooked lanes of the cities in black billows so thick that you can’t see farther than your outstretched arm—and there’s nothing to look at anyway. The Italians are a gloomy, morose people, hunchbacked from centuries of excessive labor; they have sunken, consumptive chests and are constantly hawking blood, so that the streets are entirely covered with bloody tubercular spittle. Rarely, oh, so rarely, a weak smile illuminates the pale, haggard face of an Italian, exposing his bloodless, toothless gums—and this happens only if he encounters one of us, a Soviet citizen; then the Italian will stretch out his thin, rag-covered arms and quietly wheeze: “Comrade! Kremlin!”—and again let his weakened limbs fall powerlessly to his side.

In the middle of Italy rises a black, gloomy fortress—the Vatican. A horrible, foul-smelling moat surrounds the fortress on all sides, and only once a year a squeaking drawbridge lowers its rusty chains to let in trucks full of gold. Crows circle the Vatican cawing ominously, and higher up helicopters zoom around, and even higher—Pershing missiles. Once in a while a wheezing laugh sounds from within the fortress walls—it’s the pope of Rome, a dreary old man whom no one has ever seen. He’s well-fed and rich, of course; he has his own fields and flocks, so he eats sausage, fat, and dumplings every day, and pizza on holidays. In the Vatican cellar there’s a harem: hundreds of magnificent girls languish there, including some of our Soviet girls who traded their native expanses for a pottage of lentils. Well, they miscalculated—they’re only given lentils once a year, on International Women’s Day, most of the time they only get gruel. And the piss pots aren’t even emptied every day.

The Vatican guards are terrifying—whoever approaches is shot without warning. A step to the left or right is considered an attempt on the pope’s life. That’s why no one can do anything with him. Well-trained German shepherds and electrified barbed wire complete the oppressive effect.

Rats dart about Italy in such numbers that cars can hardly get through. And anyway, who has the money for cars? Per-khushkov cried bitterly. Only fat cats and the rich! They ride around happy as clams in linguini, drinking wine day and night in luxurious palaces and cathedrals and laughing loudly at simple Italians, who can only clench their gaunt fists powerlessly. The shelves in the stores are empty, and often, constantly even, you see little children—every last one of whom is on crutches, by the way—fighting in the garbage over a piece of bread.

“Who throws away bread, if there’s nothing in the stores?” said Antonina Sergeevna, starting up in horror.

“The Mafia,” Perkhushkov said sternly. “The Mafia throws bread away.”

“My G-o-d…”

“Yes. And I can say this out loud to you, because you and I have nothing to fear, but for exposing this secret the Mafia killed all the police commissars, all the republic’s prosecutors, all the carabinieri, and now it’s holding the members of their families—including great aunts—hostage to unceasing terror. And the Mafia itself lives in luxurious palaces and cathedrals and laughs loudly.”

Perkhushkov was so upset by the sight of the luxurious palaces and cathedrals built with loathing by the simple oppressed medieval masses that he couldn’t even look at these odious edifices, which were barely perceptible through the smoke, and so covered his eyes with his hands; in fact, the entire Soviet delegation walked along with their eyes shut tight. A completely different, noble feeling seized him at the sight of the dilapidated hovels of simple Italians, and it was with particular warmth and tenderness that his eyes followed simple unemployed folk and the simple oppressed masses crawling by on crutches, and he even caught up with one of them and gave him a ruble with Lomonosov’s profile. If he ran into someone wealthier, Perkhushkov clenched his fists and ground his teeth in rage, and between his eyebrows a fierce fold appeared instantly, smoothing out for good only on the way home when the train switched wheels at the border in Chop. From the very beginning Perkhushkov was tormented by homesickness. He began pining and feeling uncomfortable while still waiting for his passport to be issued. Worse! As soon as the word “Italy” had been pronounced, Perkhushkov was pierced by such intolerable anguish that he flew out into the courtyard like a pterodactyl and embraced a birch tree planted recently during a voluntary labor day in such a death grip that he had to be torn off together with the leaves and bark: before parting he had wanted to at least drink his fill of birch sap. Sitting in the airplane he pined: he pressed greedily to the window and watched with swollen eyes as his homeland slipped back. When the airplane crossed the border, Perkhushkov felt as though he’d been pierced by a white-hot rod, he was overcome, stricken. He tore himself from his seat, knocking over the packets of sugar and salt, the plastic cup with mineral water, and the meat patty in tomato sauce—so beloved and familiar!—and dashed, sobbing, to the emergency exit to unclamp the locks. It was only with great difficulty that he was held back by two stewardesses, the flight engineer, and the second pilot, whose eyes were also swollen from tears and longing for our native buckwheat expanses. Similar attacks of nostalgia, ever more frequent, overwhelmed him in Italy as well: at night he tossed about and bit his clenched, whitened fists; and during the day he sat in his room on the bed with a lackluster gaze, his head lowered, his arms limp as seaweed at his side, and continually muttered: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” His comrades invited him to go to dilapidated theaters, drink disagreeable wine, ride in a leaky gondola—how could he? So it’s understandable that on encountering a compatriot—one of our guys, from Tver—Perkhushkov threw himself on the fellow and clutched him so powerfully that the guy suffocated in Perkhushkov’s embrace, in connection with which there was even a bit of unpleasantness about the corpse, an explanatory note had to be written to the institution which had sent the deceased to the capitalist country and a little fuss made about a pension for the widow and orphans, but that’s unimportant, what’s important is the agonizing patriotic feeling which seized Perkhushkov on his return: a feeling of pride in his homeland, her skies and other analogous spaces, her majestic achievements, broad step, steady stride, and high dairy yield.

“The homeland,” cried an agitated Perkhushkov, “oh, what could be dearer than the homeland in a world of Final Resolutions? Nothing! And indeed, how wise are the golden Final Resolutions with their piercing light, how timely and yet how unexpectedly they occur, with what profound heat they scorch our souls, even like unto a gleaming sword, double-edged, bilaterally sinuous, filled with untold radiance, indestructible, indivisible, invincible forever and ever more! And truly—how would we live without Resolutions, we, who are pitiful, white, naked, blind, and trembling, like the cold worms and legless water larvae? O, shall we be likened unto the transparent lice, who in dense ignorance and animal unbelief gnaw the green leaf; O, shall we be likened unto the simple insects, who throng unaware in a drop of well water? O, shall we be likened unto the undifferentiated amoebas thirsting and fearing the division of their very selves—and sinfully thirsting in vain, for nothing which divideth in itself will stand; O, how dark, empty, and fearful it would be for us without Resolutions, how timidly we crawl between the stony desert’s mountain outcrops, starting in fear at the least flutter or squeak, how pitifully we whine, stretching our hands, tentacles, metamerie segments, chewers, pincers, and cilia into the utter darkness, which giveth forth only cold and a fetid roar: enlighten us! O, enlighten us! And how dimly the chill, extinguished, previous Final Resolutions glimmer, as if coated with fog and rust, for they have lost their currency and topical interest, like a maid loseth the color of youth, like a rose—its springtime pollen…

“And behold, the hour chimeth, and it cannot be foreseen, a voice thundereth—and who would dare envision it? The heavens open wide and the shrouds are rent, and the hundred-eyed Beast, whose number is twelve, sort of all in purple and scarlet, revealeth himself in a terrible thunder, rolling his legs:

“—and a papakha hat of costly lamb’s wool is his miter, and his clothes are of wool, the finest spun and the color of evening mists;

“—and his breast and his loins are of rubies and purest unpolluted gold, his shroud is double-breasted, and in number his snaps equal the sands of the seas;

“—at his head lies the star Saryn, a corpse lieth at his feet; girdled is he with inexpressible crenulations;

“—and, raising high a horn, with a voice like the sound of the waters he thrice exclaimeth: Behold, behold, behold the Final Resolutions!

“And with uncompared strength, and sound equally beyond compare, the Beast unfoldeth the list of Final Resolutions, and their light, my compatriots—their light was like unto the explosion of a thousand suns, and seeing it, all gloom, foulness, and filth ran, hiding from the face of the earth, letting forth a stream of helpless maledictions.

“So, describe this, my friend, my young poet,” Perkhushkov asked Lyonechka, “describe it as a citizen, as a soldier, one of the ranks. And may this book be as sweet as honey on our tongues, in our belly let it be ever as bitter as the root of the wormwood of Kara Kum, as the medicinal resin of the Pamir caves, as the salt of the lakes of Elton and Baskunchak, may its effect be ever purifying as the Carlsbad salts.”

Perkhushkov peeled off Svetlana, stood up, and straightened his shirt, vest, army jacket, overcoat, cloak, parka, shroud, and black cape with an azure lining—he straightened everything that he had on or imagined he wore.

“And as far as the homeland is concerned,” he said from the threshold, piercing a terrified Judy with his forty eyes, “I’ve explained it. Whosoever abideth in it, he will abide. As for those who can’t—we’ll find the right abode for them.” And, narrowing some of his eyes, he flashed his spurs and left.

“Well, now,” sighed Antonina Sergeevna, “home is always best, who can argue? This year there was even butter in the stores, and in the work rations there’s always butter for 3.50 a kilo.”

“There was yeast,” affirmed Vasily Paramonovich.

“Yeast there was. And there’s always flour. I don’t know what else one needs. Veterans get raisins. Live as you please. Who needs any old Italy?”

“But he doesn’t travel of his own free will,” noted Vasily Paramonovich. “It’s for his job. And about writing that story— he’s right. That’s good. You write, young man, and you listen to me,” he recommended to Lyonechka. “I’ll give you a story too. Now, let’s say we take a certain comrade. A simple lad, a Russian. Served at the front, for that matter. Two wounds, but one of them’s not really serious, well, in the soft tissues, let’s say, that’s it. But the other’s worse. Yes. The second should be a bit more serious. But then, of course, that’s not the point, I leave that to your imagination. So he returns from the front, straight to the factory as a wire maker, the girls there are nice, there’s one particularly spunky one… but that’s also up to your imagination. That’s not the point. So, the years pass. They elect him to management. And the years pass. He’s in management, I can’t deny it. But! You see, the plot is that, well, they won’t move him up higher, not for anything. He soft-soaps Kuznetsov and Agafonov—I’m just giving an example—no soap. It’s like he’s caught his pants on a nail, to use the vernacular. What’s going on? he wonders. What’s going on? Yes… There’s a story for you. From real life. They’re always writing a lot of stuff and nonsense. Kisses. All beside the point. And when you’re in Moscow, you publish it—what I told you, this story. Those in the know—will be downright horridified, I tell you. There might even be disturbances. They might even have to bring in the troops. So you go easy on it, don’t overdo it. Keep the brakes on. Okay?”

On the eve of the Tulumbasses’ arrival, Olga Khristoforovna galloped through the town of R. on the kolkhoz steed with a black banner in her right hand and an ultimatum in her left. She demanded the abolition of money, of privilege rations and regular ration tickets, demanded the closing of special distribution order desks, the cancellation of exams in schools and universities, and proclaimed the emancipation of horses, dogs, and parrots, if it should happen that such were to be found in the personal use of the inhabitants of the town of R.; she demanded the destruction of fences, locks, keys, curtains, rugs, sheets, pillowcases with and without rickrack, pillows, feath-erbeds, house slippers, underwear, handkerchiefs, beads, earrings, rings, brooches and pendants, tablecloths, forks, spoons, tea and coffee china—with the exception of plain tea glasses— ties, hats, ladies’ purses, woolens, silk, synthetics, viscose, and nylon. Olga Khristoforovna permitted the inhabitants of the town of R. to keep for their personal use no more than one table, two stools, one zinc bucket, tin cups with handles (three), folding knives (two), one Primus stove with monthly registration, and one and a half cubic meters of firewood per family; blankets—one per capita; cigarettes and lighters—ad libitum.

Moreover, Olga Khristoforovna declared that she had renamed nature once and for all, on a global basis, and that henceforth the town of R. and the rest of the world would be granted August Bebel Autumn Rains, Vera Slutskaya Foggy Dawns, Nogin Clouds, Uritsky Sunrises, and Red Banner Snowstorms named after the Awakening Women of the Trans-Caucasus.

In conclusion, Olga Khristoforovna certified that her teaching was correct, because it was right.

It was in connection with Olga Khristoforovna’s dangerous behavior that a nearby military unit was called in to assist; this was made all the more necessary, Vasily Paramonovich explained, because in any event you could expect excesses on the part of the population: after all, there have been cases in which local hotheads have forced their way through to visiting sister regionals and demanded that they convey slander of one kind or another to the United Nations: whether it’s that the wheat is infected with beetles, or that horned fish are being sold and that they’re supposedly radioactive—whereas if the fish happen to have horns, then it’s for completely different, personal reasons known only to the fish—or that men’s socks end up in the margarine and it’s hard to spread on bread, which isn’t true. It spreads beautifully.

The Tulumbasses began arriving from the south, and from the north came an unlimited contingent of troops. Blimps hovered on high, decorated with mustachioed ears of wheat and a short accompanying text: “Oh, rye, rye!”—all the rest had been crossed out by the censor. Between the south, north, and on high, Olga Khristoforovna galloped like the spirit of vengeance, and the underground caverns, roaring with liberated hot water, sonorously responded to the blows of the horses’ hooves.

In anticipation of meeting the Tulumbasses the comrades in charge ascended the hill and Antonina Sergeevna demanded that we, as guests from the capital and partly relatives, also stand on the hill with kerchiefs and bread and salt in outstretched hands. Vasily Paramonovich had donned his sturdiest suit and his electronic watch; Akhmed Khasianovich had shaved three times and now worriedly fingered the quickly darkening bristle rushing to grow out again; Antonina Sergeevna looked as though she had recently died and been stylishly, expensively mummified—the cold wind blew on her curls, amongst which rollers, forgotten in her haste, could be fleetingly glimpsed. Perkhushkov was also around somewhere pretending to be either a boulder overgrown with late, frost-bitten plantains, or maybe that dead branch over there. The rowan-berry blazed, promising a stormy winter soon to come, and far off, as far as the eye could see, the distant woods were already yellow and reddish brown, enveloped in an autumnal haze.

And the gray vault of the heaven over us where the squadron howled, racing by with no place to land, and the distant brown forests, and the hill in the middle of the globe where we stamped our feet in the wind that blew salt out of the carved salt cellars, and the frozen earth, shuddering under the hooves of the raven black steed, invisible from here—at that moment all this was our life, our one and only, full, hermetic, real, palpable life. This is what it was and nothing else. And there was only one way out of it.

“No, this is not life,” Judy said suddenly in a loud voice, reading my thoughts, and everyone looked around in bewilderment. But she was wrong. This was life, life. This was it. Because life, as we were taught, is a form of existence of protein molecules, and anything else is just empty pretense, patterns on the water, pictures in smoke. All you have to do is accept this wise view and the heart won’t hurt so much, “and if it should— then just a little bit,” as the poet wrote. If only we dreamed a little less—life is cruel to dreamers. What had I done wrong? But I wasn’t even the issue. What had Judy done wrong: Judy who caught a cold on the hill in the town of R. and died two weeks later of pneumonia, not having given birth to Pushkin for us after all, not having encountered a single sick animal, Judy who vanished in vain? To tell the truth, she died like a dog, in a strange country, amid strangers to whom—why beat around the bush?—she was nothing but a burden. You remember her once in a while and think: who was she, what did she want, and what was her real name after all? And what did she think about these odd people who surrounded her, hiding, shouting, fearing, and lying—people white as beetle grubs, fly larvae, raw dough, people who would start babbling and waving their arms frantically, or suddenly stand stock-still at the window in tears, as if it were they who had gone astray in life’s thicket? And Uncle Zhenya—what had he done wrong, he who was torn into pieces, into basic protein molecules next to a waterfall in an alien land—a stick in his hand, an uneaten banana in his mouth, pain and bewilderment in his bulging diplomatic eyes? And truthfully, feeling a romantic kinship with him, I won’t judge him, as I will judge neither Olga Khristoforovna with her nightly spinsterish dreams of sabers and smoke and dappled steeds, nor Vasily Paramonovich, who was born to crawl, but flew with rapture like a child whenever possible, nor Svetlana, a simple Moscow girl with the appetite of a padishah.

Then the hawthorn bush shook, and coughing, Perkhushkov spoke up unseen from the bush:

“Oh damn! Mea culpa. You people will be the death of me. We didn’t foresee possible currency operations.”

“What currency operations?” said Akhmed Khasianovich, looking around with his mad, magnificent goat eyes. Svetlana glanced at Akhmed Khasianovich, fell in love with him to the grave, and pressed herself to his breast.

“What kind, what kind,” came the shout from the bush, “forbidden ones, that’s what kind! Don’t you realize what awaits us? I sit on high, look far and wide, never close my eyes, I spy, I spy: our sister-region comrades pass through town and village, our sister-region comrades bear Tulumbass currency: its light is blinding, its quantity uncounted, in town and village they’re buying up milk and cabbage, galoshes and caramels, undermining the allowable, violating the permissible. Soon the Tulumbass comrades will set foot in the town of R., which is entrusted to my care: pillars will collapse and roofs will crack, walls will sway and the earth will yawn, the savings banks will go up in black smoke and a heavenly fire will devour the housing offices and government insurance departments if the tiniest unit of currency touches the right hand of even our lowliest compatriot. Terror, noose, and pit!” shouted the bush.

And, as if in answer to his speech, down below, at the foot of the hill, a horn rang out: it was Olga Khristoforovna announcing the assembly of all the units, which, however, weren’t there.

“There’s bad luck for you…” whispered Vasily Paramono-vich. “Or maybe it’ll work out? It seems the central authorities informed us that their currency is shells on twine. Tiny little things, yellow, with spots. Shaped like a baby’s privates. There were instructions.”

“Maybe it will work out,” the bush said, calming down. “And anyway, Akhmed Khasianovich is responsible.”

“They’re coming!” shouted Akhmed Khasianovich. The Tulumbasses walked on and on in an endless stream, breaking bushes and crushing trees.

“About five thousand,” estimated Vasily Paramonovich, swearing as nastily as a soldier.

“Tartars through and through,” said Antonina Sergeevna sadly in a very old-fashioned way, to which the Tartar Akhmed Khasianovich replied, “I beg your pardon?”

“Why are they armed?” cried the keen-eyed Perkhushkov. “I’m going to have to annihilate a few people with entries in their dossiers.”

“That’s the way he always is,” said Antonina Sergeevna. “Tries to scare you, but he’s really a kind soul. He also loves fowl. At home he’s got baby chickens and ducklings and turkey chicks. He recognizes them all and knows them by name. Feeds them himself and eats them himself. And he always writes down which one he’s eaten: Rainbow or Buck Buck or White Tail, and he pastes a photo in his album. Just like children, honestly.”

The sun broke through the clouds and shone on the gun barrels of the approaching crowd.

“Hey, it’s our guys! Soldiers!” Vasily Paramonovich laughed joyfully. “They got here on time. Bread and salt retreat! Those are our guys. There, the tanks have appeared. Lord, what a wonderful sight!”

And truly, they were our guys. They moved harmoniously, beautifully, leaving behind them an even swath, like a highway. They moved on foot and on motorcycles, on jeeps, and tanks, and Volgas, black and milk-colored, and one Mercedes, camouflaged as a train trackman’s hut.

The hut turned its back to the forest, its face to us, and from the lacquered door Colonel Zmeev emerged, glowing with unbearable male beauty.

On seeing him, Svetlana even let out a cry.

“Heigh-ho!” Colonel Zmeev greeted our leadership in English. “To your health. How many magnificent multicolored women and stylish civilians. How marvelously the sun shines and the frosty wind refreshes. How symbolic are the generous gifts of our rich earth: bread, and likewise salt. But we’re no slouches: allow me to thank you for your attention and hospitality and offer you these modest gifts, made or requisitioned by our departmental craftsmen in their rare hours of leisure. Amangeldyev! Hand out the modest gifts.”

Amangeldyev, a soldier of medium height whose face expressed constant readiness either for fright or for immediate physical pleasure, offered the box with the modest gifts and spread out on the withered grass a fringed tablecloth which was somehow instantly and densely covered with bottles of cognac and cold fish snacks.

“To your arrival!” Vasily Paramonovich clinked glasses with the guests. “Thank God. You got here in time. We had already started to worry. The aviation up there—they didn’t disappoint us, they’ve been around since morning. The sixth ocean! You get my meaning!”

“The wild blue yonder,” agreed Akhmed Khasianovich, glancing jealously at the colonel, who was thrice entwined by Svetlana. “Heavenly eagles.”

“Steel birds zoom in where tanks fear to crawl,” said Vasily Paramonovich joyfully.

“It’s not quite like that,” smiled Colonel Zmeev. “With the help of contemporary technology we can crawl in where our grandfathers never dreamed. The song’s outdated.”

“Pickles! Help yourselves to pickles! Dig in!” bustled Antonina Sergeevna, treating the guests to their own goods.

“Oh, the eternally feminine,” said Zmeev, approving Antonina Sergeevna’s fussing, and Svetlana squeezed him even harder.

Lyonechka looked at Amangeldyev, who, as a representative of a national minority and moreover a simple subordinate, had instantly endeared himself to the poet.

After a snack, the colonel distributed the gifts. Lyonechka was presented a length of green Syrian brocade 240 by 70 centimeters, which he gave straightaway to Amangeldyev for puttees. (Like a shout in the mountains, this act provoked an entire avalanche of events: Amangeldyev’s grateful relatives sent Lyonechka’s family monthly parcels of dried apricots, whetting stones, fake medicinal resin, and dark blue raisins for two years; since by that time Lyonechka had already disappeared, his flabbergasted family, suffocating under the landslide of gifts and not understanding what it owed to the unknown givers, scrupulously tried to stop this bounty with no return address. Then three of Amangeldyev’s cousins descended, wanting to rent an apartment, sell melons, buy rugs, and enter law school to become prosecutors; greeted with insufficient affection, in their view, they burned down a cooperative garage, tore up a children’s sandbox, and bent in half the linden saplings recently planted by Pioneer scouts; not having fully appreciated the effectiveness of Aunt Zina’s old connections, however, they were captured in the Hunters’ Café in the middle of bartering a suitcase full of turquoise for yellow-striped certificate rubles with a certain Gokht, for whom the police had long been searching, but this is all beside the point.) Judy received dried fish, Svetlana a pen on a granite base, and I got a Warsaw Pact Armed Forces calendar of memorable dates.

Then from the town the horn sounded once again and Olga Khristoforovna could be heard shouting through the megaphone:

“Everyone lay down your weapons! I’ll count to 3,864,881. One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight!…”

“There’s time,” said Zmeev. “Another round of drinks—and then we’ll start shooting.”

“Shoot her, my dears, she sings songs,” complained Vasily Paramonovich.

And sure enough, far below, Olga Khristoforovna, having counted to ninety-nine, interrupted her count and started singing:

“That’s all right, she’s singing about the Vatican,” said Perkhushkov, listening closely. “That’s allowed.”

“You don’t have to shoot her, just catch her,” said Antonina Sergeevna sympathetically. “She’s not so bad.”

“What do you mean, not shoot her, when she’s right out in the open?” said Zmeev in amazement. “Amangeldyev, give me the gun.”

The colonel hoisted the gun on his shoulder and fired. Olga Khristoforovna fell from the horse.

“Now she’s not singing,” explained the colonel. “Let’s have another drink. The pickles are good.”

“What are you doing?” Lyonechka screamed. “Why are you shooting people?”

But no one listened to him.

“Shooting—is beautiful. It’s moving,” Zmeev told his drink-flushed comrades. “After all, what do we value in life—what pleasures, I mean? In pickles—we value the crunch, in kisses— the smack, and in gunshots—the loud, clear bang. Just now we were coming here through the woods, and suddenly from all sides—a bunch of Negroes. Like this little lady here,” he said, pointing at Judy. “All painted white, feathers in their noses, feathers in their ears, even, forgive me, in front of the ladies I won’t say where, but there were feathers there too. Superb targets, little toys. We had a good shoot.”

“Was anyone left alive?” asked Akhmed Khasianovich.

“Not a one, I assure you. It was all clean.”

“Well, all right, then. We’ll call off the blimps. Retreat,” sighed Akhmed Khasianovich.

“Let them stay!” cried the inebriated Vasily Paramonovich. “Aren’t they beautiful? Just like silver pigeons. I remember when I was just a little tyke I used to keep pigeons. You wave your hand and they—frrrrr!—they fly off! And how they quiver, quiver, quiver! Ah!”

“Well, one last round—and we’ll go for a ride,” proposed the colonel. “What do you young people say? We’ll look for mushrooms.”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Svetlana begged, admiring the colonel. “I want mushrooms, mushrooms.”

“Amangeldyev, Mush… rrrooooms!!!”

In the tipsiness and turmoil it was hard to say who sat, lay, or stood where, or who hung on whom, but, twining into a living lump, we were already racing in the Mercedes over hummocks and roots, and the pines zipped by, merging into a sturdy fence, and the wild raspberry whipped the windows, and Judy cheeped, pushing away the fat stomach of the sleeping Vasily Paramonovich, and Antonina Sergeevna bleated, and Spiridonov, squeezed in somewhere just under the roof, played someone’s national anthem, and no one divided us into the clean and unclean, and the sunset that appeared out of nowhere blazed like the yawn of a scarlatina-infected throat, and it was too early to let the crow out of the ark, for it was farther than ever to firm ground.

“My little rifle!” said the colonel, tickling Svetlana.

“Are you married?” Svetlana asked her magnificent beloved.

“Yes, siree. I’m married.”

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No, siree, it doesn’t matter.”

“I want mushrooms right now,” begged Svetlana.

“You’ll have your mushrooms. I’ll show you a toadstool you’ll never forget,” promised the colonel.

“Oh, the girl is going to get herself into trouble,” whined Spiridonov through his anthem, feasting his eyes on Svetlana. And she was something to look at—but Svetlana, shining with happiness, was not meant for the invalid—her hair glowed with its own light, her eyes had turned purple like a mermaid’s, her powder had blown away and her makeup fallen off, and she was so beautiful that Spiridonov swore quietly and pledged that he would give away half a kingdom for a glance from her—half a kingdom with all its half-palaces, half-stables, half-barrels of kvass, with all its mushrooms, pearls, tin, and brocade, with its kulich and gingerbread dough, raisins, bridles, saffron, burlap mats, sickles, plows, and rubies, its wild turkeys, azure flowers, and morocco leather half-boots. Only he didn’t have any of this.

The ark stopped, and Svetlana, arm in arm with Colonel Zmeev, walked into the forest on tiptoe.

“I’ll hire myself out as a sailor, and carry you off to Bombay!” Spiridonov shouted after her like a fool. And he himself blushed.

“We, too, were young turks once upon a time,” sighed Vasily Paramonovich who had awakened. “And what are you doing here?” he suddenly jumped on Judy. “What’s she doing here?”

“I… animals… want to cure animals…” babbled Judy.

“She wants to cure animals. You should cure us, that’s what,” Vasily Paramonovich raged, suddenly angry for some unknown reason. “Any fool can cure animals! I soft-soaped Agafonov, I soft-soaped Kuznetsov, I worked hard at it, how much good I did for people—anyone else would have puked.

Need cement—go to Vasily Paramonovich, need stucco—go to Vasily Paramonovich, but for promotions—go to someone else. That’s the point, not curing animals. All they do is walk around and around, around and around.”

“He’s kind, very kind,” explained Antonina Sergeevna. “The weather’s affected him, but he’s very kind. At home he’s got canaries, ten of them, and in the morning as soon as he’s up, he sings to them—cheep, cheep, cheep, and they already know him, they chirp. They can feel kindness. Well, now, where are our people?”

Straightening his military jacket, Colonel Zmeev came out of the forest.

“Everything’s in order. Let’s go have dinner.”

“But where’s Svetlana?”

“I accidentally killed her,” laughed the colonel. “I was hugging her and hugging her, well and… I squashed her a little. You know how it happens. It’s all right, I’ll send a unit up later, they’ll dig a hole. There’s not much work there. It’s army business. Well, let’s go. Amangeldyev!”

It’s strange now, after fifteen years have passed, to think that not one of us has remained—neither Svetlana, who died, one likes to think, of happiness; nor Judy—even her grave is gone now, replaced by a road; nor Lyonechka, who lost his reason after Judy’s death and ran into the forest on all fours—though they do say that he’s alive and that some frightened children saw him lapping water at a stream, and there’s a group of engineers, aficionados of the mysterious, who organized a society for the capture of “the wild mid-Russian man,” as they refer to him scientifically, and every summer they set up ambushes with strings, nets, and hooks and set out bait—cakes, Danish, rolls with marzipan—not understanding that Lyonechka, an exalted and poetic individual, will only fall for the spiritual. Spiridonov’s gone, he ended his life quietly with a natural death at a venerable age, and had subsequently invented many interesting things: a talking teapot, and automatic slippers, and a cigarette case with an alarm clock. There’s no one left, and you don’t know whether to regret this, whether to grieve, or whether to bless the time, which took these unfit, unnecessary people back into its thick, impenetrable stream.

Well, at least they sank into it untouched, whole, but Uncle Zhenya was picked up in pieces, in fasciae, hairs, and tufts; moreover they never did find one of his eyes, and he lay in his coffin with a black velvet patch on his face just like Moshe Dayan or Nelson, in a new striped suit borrowed from the embassy cook, to whom, by the way, they kept promising and promising but never did pay any compensation, which pushed him into counterfeiting invoices for marinated guava. And it’s well known: once you start it’s hard to stop; the cook got carried away, it turned his head, and although every day he promised himself he’d stop, the demon was stronger. Somehow a Rolls-Royce appeared, then a second, a third, a fourth; then, of course, he developed a passion for art and began to understand all the subtleties of the expensive contemporary avant-garde and didn’t like politics anymore, the ambassador and certain of the embassy secretaries didn’t suit him—careful, cook!—then came the connection with the local mafia, the racket and narcotics business, secret control over a network of banks and brothels, intrigues with the military, and plans for a widespread government coup.

So by the time the cook, exposed at last, once again found himself amid the whortleberry copses and cumulous clouds of the homeland, he had managed to complicate the international situation so thoroughly, to inflate the prices on natural resources so enormously, and to introduce such bedlam into the art market, that it’s unlikely to be corrected by the end of the current millennium. The oil boom was also his doing, said the cook on visiting Aunt Zina at the May and November holidays. Hed already gone to pieces by this time, was unshaven and dressed in a quilted jacket; Aunt Zina spread a newspaper on the kitchen floor so that the cook wouldn’t drip while he drank a few shots of vodka; “I’m not asking you for money for the suit,” said the cook, “I understand you’re a widow, I only ask respect for my services, because the oil boom—that was my doing; and I never tasted that guava in my life, and there’s no cause to go dumping it all on me, only honor and respect, I don’t need any suits, and if I’ve got a real head on my shoulders then you should appreciate it, and not attack me—in another government I would have been oh so useful, they’d have asked me to be president and everything. They’d have said: Mikhail Ivanych, be our president, and you’ll be honored and respected, and the suit, a piece of junk, is totally unnecessary, to hell with your suits… Here’s where I had them all,” said the cook, showing his fist, “this is where they all were, and if need be I’ll have them in the same place again: all those kings and presidents and general-admirals and all sorts of shahs. If you want to know the truth, I already had Norodom Sihanouk on a hook, I’d call him on a direct line: So, Norodom, how’s it going, you still hanging in there?” “I’m still hanging in, Mikhail Ivanych!”

“Well, then, you just keep on hanging…” “What is it, what can I do for you, Mikhail Ivanych?” “Nothing, I say to him, just checking… Keep on hanging, just don’t let go…” Or else the emperor of Japan would call me on the direct line: Here I am, Mikhail Ivanych, he’d say, I sat down to eat raw fish, but it’s no fun without you, why don’t you fly over and keep us company; yeah, sure, as if I hadn’t ever eaten that fish of yours; no, he says, hee-hee-hee, you haven’t eaten this kind, only I eat this kind… but everybody keeps on talking about this guava business,” swore the cook, as Aunt Zina pushed him toward the door. “Don’t you touch me! You, there, don’t grab my sleeve!” And snatching a ruble or sometimes even three, he would tumble noisily into the elevator, where he vomited the grated carrot and beet stars of a recently eaten salad.

Having done the appropriate amount of crying and mourning, Aunt Zina had long since calmed down, and, seeing as people are weak and vain, found satisfaction in calling herself a social consultant on the capture of the wild mid-Russian man. She emphasized proudly that he was a close relative, and her neighbors envied her and even tried to arrange intrigues to deny her relationship, but, of course, they were put to shame. “How proud Zhenya would be if he’d lived to see this,” Aunt Zina repeated, her eyes shining like a young woman’s.

Every year in the fall, regardless of the weather, I drop by to fetch her; she straightens the lace scarf on her head, takes my arm, and we walk—in no hurry, a step at a time, to visit Pushkin, to place flowers at his feet. “If they’d just made a little more effort—he would have been born,” whispers Aunt Zina with love. She gazes up at his lowered, blind, greenish face, soiled to the ears by the doves of peace, gazes into his sorrowful chin, forever frozen to his unwarming, metallic foulard blanketed with Moscow’s snows, as if expecting that he, hearing her through the cold and gloom of his new, commendatore-like countenance, would raise his head, reach his hand out from his bosom, and bless everyone: bless those near and far, crawling and flying, deceased and unborn, tender and scaly, bivalve and molluscan; bless those who sing in the groves and curl up under the bark of trees, who buzz amid the flowers and crowd in a column of light; bless those who vanished amid the feasts, in the sea of life, and in the dismal abysses of the earth.

“And the Slavs’ proud grandson now grown wild…” Aunt Zina triumphantly whispers. “How does the rest of the poem go?”

“I don’t remember,” I say. “Let’s leave, Aunt Zina, before the police chase us off.”

And it’s true, I don’t remember another word.