Wang started, smiling pitifully, picked up a glass, and pressed it against his lips.
“Tse-tung?” Fritz asked menacingly. “Who’s ’at?”
Andrei drained his glass in a single gulp and, feeling slightly stunned, started hastily jabbing his fork at the hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly it was as if all the conversations were reaching him from the next room. Stalin . . . Yes, of course. There has to be some kind of link . . . Why didn’t that ever occur to me before! Phenomena of the same scale—cosmic. There has to be some kind of link and interconnection . . . Let’s say this is the question: the choice between the success of the Experiment and the health of Comrade Stalin. Which one, for me personally, as a citizen, as a warrior . . . Of course, Katzman says Stalin’s dead already, but that’s not important. Let’s suppose he’s alive. And let’s suppose the choice I’m facing is: the Experiment or the cause of Stalin . . . No, rubbish, that’s not right. To continue the cause of Stalin under Stalin’s leadership or continue the cause of Stalin in completely different conditions, exceptional conditions, unforeseen by any theory—that’s how the question is posed.
“And what makes you think the Mentors are continuing the cause of Stalin?” Andrei suddenly heard Izya’s voice say, and realized that he’d been speaking out loud for some time already.
“But what other work can they be doing?” he asked in astonishment. “There’s only one cause on Earth worth working for—building communism! That is Stalin’s cause.”
“That’s a D for you in the Basics of Scientific Communism,” Izya retorted. “Stalin’s cause is the building of socialism in one country, the consistent struggle against imperialism, and the extension of the socialist camp to include the whole world. Somehow I don’t see how you can achieve those goals here.”
“Borrring!” Selma whined. “Let’s have some music! I want to dance!”
But Andrei was already blind and deaf to everything. “You dogmatist!” he barked. “You’re a Talmudist and doctrinarian! And, in general, a metaphysician. You don’t see anything but the form. It doesn’t matter what form the Experiment takes! But it can only have the same content, and only one final result: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the laboring farmers—”
“And the toiling intelligentsia!” Izya put in.
“What damned intelligentsia . . . What sort of shit-pie garbage is that—the intelligentsia!”
“Yes, true,” said Izya. “That’s from a different era.”
“The intelligentsia is altogether impotent!” Andrei declared bitterly. “A lickspittle social stratum. It serves whoever holds the power.”
“A gang of wimps,” barked Fritz. “Wimps and blabbermouths, an eternal source of slackness and disorganization!”
“Precisely!” Andrei would have preferred to be supported by Uncle Yura, say, but support was useful even from Fritz’s side. “There, if you please: Heiger. Basically the class enemy, but his position coincides perfectly with ours. So it turns out that from the viewpoint of any class, the intelligentsia is shit.” He grated his teeth. “I hate them . . . I can’t stand those spineless, four-eyed weaklings, blabbermouths, freeloaders. They’ve got no inner strength, no faith, no morality . . .”
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun!” Fritz proclaimed in a metallic voice.
“Ah, no,” said Andrei. “I part company with you there. You drop that! Culture is the great heritage of the liberated people. What’s needed here is a dialectical . . .”
Somewhere close by the phonograph was thundering and Otto was stumbling around drunkenly, dancing with drunken Selma, but Andrei wasn’t interested in that. The best part of all was just beginning, the thing for which he loved these get-togethers more than anything else in the world. The argument.
“Down with culture!” Izya howled, skipping from one empty chair to another in order to move closer to Andrei. “It’s got nothing to do with our Experiment. What is the goal of the Experiment? That’s the question! You just tell me that.”
“I already told you: to create a model of communist society!”
“What in hell’s name would the Mentors want with a model of communist society? Judge for yourself, cabbage-head!”
“And why not? Why not?”
“What I think, though, is this,” said Uncle Yura. “The Mentors aren’t real human beings. They’re, how can I put it . . . a different species, I suppose . . . They’ve planted us in a fish tank . . . or something like a zoological garden . . . and they’re watching to see what happens.”
“Did you think that up for yourself, Yurii Konstantinovich?” Izya asked, and turned toward him, suddenly immensely interested.
Uncle Yura fingered his right cheekbone and replied evasively, “It emerged in the course of debate.”
Izya actually slammed his fist down on the table. “How incredible!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Why? Where does it all come from? Why do the most different kinds of people, and people who basically think in entirely conformist terms, come up with this idea that the Mentors are not human in origin? The idea that the Experiment is being conducted by higher powers of some kind?”
“Well, for instance, I asked him straight out,” Kensi put in. “‘Are you aliens?’ He avoided giving a direct answer, but he didn’t actually deny it.”
“And I was told they’re human beings from a different dimension,” said Andrei. It felt awkward talking about the Mentor, like discussing family matters with outsiders. “But I’m not sure I understood correctly . . . Maybe it was just allegorical.”
“But I won’t have it!” Fritz abruptly declared. “I’m not an insect. I am myself. Aha!” he exclaimed, swinging his hand through the air. “I’d never have ended up here if I hadn’t been taken prisoner, would I?”
“But why?” said Izya. “Why? I feel some kind of internal protest all the time too, and I can’t understand what’s wrong. Maybe in the long run their goals are close to ours—”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Andrei exclaimed delightedly.
“Not in that sense,” said Izya, gesturing impatiently. “It’s not all as straightforward as you make it out to be. They’re trying to figure out the human race, right? Make sense of it. And problem number one for us is the very same: making sense of the human race, of ourselves. Maybe by figuring things out for themselves, they’ll help us figure things out as well?”
“Ah, no, my friends,” said Kensi, swaying his head from side to side. “Ah, don’t flatter yourselves. They’re preparing to colonize the Earth, and they’re using you and me to study the psychology of their future slaves.”
“But why think that, Kensi?” Andrei said disappointedly. “Why these terrible assumptions? If you ask me, thinking about them that way is simply unfair.”
“Well, I probably don’t really think that,” Kensi replied. “It’s just that I have this strange sort of feeling . . . All these baboons, the transformation of the water, the general bedlam day after day . . . One fine day they’ll hand us a confusion of tongues too . . . It seems like they’re systematically preparing us for some appalling kind of world that we’re going to live in henceforth, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. It’s like at Okinawa. I was just a little kid then, the war was going on, and the Okinawa boys and girls like me were forbidden to speak their own dialect. Nothing but Japanese. And when they caught some kid, they hung a sign around his neck: I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK PROPERLY. And he walked around with that sign.”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Izya, tugging and pinching at the wart on his neck with a frozen smile on his face.
“But I don’t understand!” Andrei declared. “All this is probably perverse supposition, it’s delusory . . . The Experiment is the Experiment. Of course we don’t understand anything. But then, we’re not supposed to understand! That’s a fundamental condition! If we understood what the baboons are for, what the switching around of professions is for . . . that understanding woul
d immediately condition our behavior, the Experiment’s integrity would be compromised, and it would fail. That’s perfectly clear! What do you think, Fritz?”
Fritz shook his blond head. “I don’t know. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in what they want. I’m interested in what I want. And I want to instill some order into this shambles. And, anyway, one of you, I don’t remember who, said that perhaps the entire purpose of the Experiment is to select those who are the most energetic, the most active, the staunchest . . . It’s not so people can prattle and babble, or dissolve into sloppy puddles like wet pastry, or start wallowing in philosophy, but to show that they can stick to their guns. Those are the ones they’ll select—the ones like me, or like you, say, Andrei, and drop them back on Earth. Because if we haven’t faltered here, we won’t falter there either.”
“It could well be!” Andrei said with a profound air. “I accept that as perfectly possible too.”
“But Donald thinks,” Wang said in a quiet voice, “that the experiment has already failed a long, long time ago.”
Everyone looked at him. Wang was sitting in the same pose of tranquility as before—with his head pulled down into his shoulders and his face raised toward the ceiling; his eyes were still closed.
“He said the Mentors got all snarled up in this stunt of theirs ages ago, they’ve tried everything they can, and now even they don’t know what to do. They’re totally busted, he said. And now everything’s just rolling along under its own inertia.”
Totally bemused, Andrei reached up to scratch the back of his head. So that was Donald’s problem! The reason he’d been so tetchy and out of sorts . . . Nobody else said anything either. Uncle Yura slowly rolled yet another crooked cigarette, Izya pinched and tormented his wart with a stony-faced smile, Kensi started guzzling cabbage again, and Fritz stared fixedly at Wang, thrusting out his jaw and then setting it back in place. This was the way demoralization set in, Andrei thought fleetingly. With conversations like this. The lack of understanding produced a lack of belief. And the lack of belief meant death. Very, very dangerous. The Mentor had told him bluntly: the essential thing was to believe in the idea to the very end, unconditionally. To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment. That was the hardest part, naturally. The majority here had no real ideological toughness, no genuine certainty that the bright future was inevitable. That no matter how tough and difficult things might be today, and tomorrow as well, the day after tomorrow the star-spangled sky will surely unfurl above our heads, and life will be bright and festive . . .
“I’m not an educated man,” Uncle Yura said suddenly, lovingly gluing together his new roll-up with his tongue. “I’ve only got four years of schooling, in case you’d like to know, and as I’ve already told Izya, to be quite frank, I bailed out to get here . . . The same way you did,” he said, pointing the roll-up at Fritz. “Only for you the road led out of captivity, and for me it led out of the collective farm, you see. Not counting the war, I spent my entire life in the village, and in my entire life I never saw any light. But here I have seen it! I’ll tell you straight, brothers, it’s beyond me what fancy business they’re up to with this Experiment of theirs, and I’m not all that interested. But here I’m a free man, and as long as they don’t touch my freedom, I won’t bother anyone either. But if anyone here suddenly decides they want to change the current status of the farmers, then I can promise you for certain that we won’t leave a stone standing in this City of yours. We’re not a fucking troop of baboons! We won’t let you put any fucking collars round our throats! So that’s the way of things, brother,” he said, speaking directly to Fritz.
Izya giggled absentmindedly, and an awkward silence fell again. Andrei was rather surprised by Uncle Yura’s tirade, and he decided that life must obviously have been especially hard on Yurii Konstantinovich, and if he said he’d never seen any light, then he must have special grounds of his own for that, and asking him about them would be tactless, especially right now. And so Andrei simply said, “We’re probably raising all these questions too soon. The Experiment hasn’t been going on for that long, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, we have to work and believe in the correctness—”
“What makes you think the Experiment hasn’t been going on for very long?” Izya interrupted him with a mocking grin. “The Experiment’s been going on for a hundred years at least. I mean to say, it’s definitely been going on for a lot longer, only I can personally vouch for a hundred years.”
“And how do you know?”
“How far to the north have you gone?” Izya asked.
Andrei was at a loss. He had no idea that there even was a north here.
“You know, north!” Izya said impatiently. “Let us notionally consider that the direction toward the sun, the direction where the swamps and the farms are, is south, and the opposite direction, moving farther in through the City, is north. You haven’t gone any farther than the garbage dumps, have you? But from there the City goes on and on: there are huge city districts, entire palaces . . .” He giggled. “Palaces and hovels. There’s no one there now, of course, because there’s no water, but someone used to live there once, and let me tell you, that ‘once’ was a pretty long time ago. The documents I discovered in empty houses there—ay-ay-ay! Have you ever heard of the monarch Velarius the Second? There, you see! Well, as it happens, he used to rule there. Only in the times when he used to rule there”—Izya tapped one fingernail on the tabletop—“there were swamps here, and their serfs labored in those swamps . . . or their slaves. And that was at least a hundred years ago.”
Uncle Yura shook his head and clicked his tongue. Fritz asked, “And what about farther north?”
“I haven’t gone any farther,” said Izya, “but I know people who have gone very far, 100 or 150 kilometers, and plenty have gone and never come back.”
“OK, so what’s there?”
“The City,” Izya said, and paused. “Mind you, they tell shameless lies about those places too. That’s why I only talk about what I’ve discovered for myself. A hundred years for certain. Got that, have you, my friend Andriusha? A hundred years is long enough to give up on any experiment.”
“Well OK, just hang on, will you . . .” Andrei muttered, flustered. “But they haven’t given up on it!” he exclaimed, perking up. “If they’re still bringing in new people all the time, they haven’t dropped it, they haven’t despaired. It’s just that the problem that’s been set is extremely complex.” A new idea occurred to him and he perked up even more. “And anyway, how do you know what their time scale is like? Maybe our year is just a second to them?”
“I don’t know anything about any of that,” Izya said with a shrug. “I’m just trying to explain to you what kind of world you live in, that’s all.”
“OK!” Uncle Yura interrupted him decisively. “We’ve wasted enough time on empty talk Hey, kiddo! What’s your name . . . Otto! Leave the girl alone and bring us . . . No he’s totally wasted already. He’ll break my carboy. I’ll go get it myself.” He slid down off the stool, picked the empty pitcher up off the table, and walked off into the kitchen.
Selma plumped down across her chair so that her legs were higher than her head again and petulantly nudged Andrei on the shoulder. “How long are you going to carry on with this tedious crap? Don’t be such an incredible drag . . . The Experiment, the Experiment . . . Give me a light!”
Andrei gave her a light. The abrupt breaking off of the conversation had stirred up some kind of unpleasant sediment inside him—something had been left unsaid, something had been misunderstood, they hadn’t let him explain, unity hadn’t been achieved . . . And Kensi was sitting there looking sad somehow, and that was a rare thing for him. We think too much of ourselves, that’s what, he thought. The Experiment is all well and good, but everyone insists on doing things his own way, clings to his own position, and we have to do it together, together!
At t
his point Uncle Yura dumped a new batch of booze on the table with a thud, and Andrei gave up on the whole damn business. They drank a glass and took a bite; Izya threw out a joke and it fell flat. Uncle Yura flung out a joke too, a monstrously obscene one, but it was very funny. Even Wang laughed, and Selma was in stitches from laughing so hard. “In the pitcher . . .” she gasped, choking and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “It won’t fit in the pitcher!”
Andrei smashed his fist down on the table and launched into his mother’s favorite song:
For all them as drink, pour them plenty,
For them as don’t drink, don’t pour any.
We’ll drink every day, singing God’s praise,
For us, for you, and for old nanny too,
Who taught us to knock back a strong glass or two . . .
They joined in with him, everyone trying his best, and then Fritz, with his eyes bulging wildly, bawled out a duet with Otto, a song that Andrei didn’t know, but an excellent one, about the quaking bones of the old, decrepit world—a magnificent battle song. Watching Andrei enthusiastically trying to sing along, Izya Katzman giggled and gurgled, rubbing his hands together, and then Uncle Yura fixed his drolly rakish, bright-eyed stare on Selma’s naked thighs and abruptly roared out in a voice like a bear:
Through the village when you go,
Coyly singing high and low,
Torturing my poor heart so,
Sweet sleep it can never know.
This was an absolute hit, and Uncle Yura carried on:
You girls are all skilled to beguile,
Luring in sweet, seductive style,
Promising with a tempting smile,
And yet deceiving all the while . . .
At that Selma took her legs down off the armrest, shoved Fritz away, and said resentfully, “I’m not promising you anything. I don’t need any of you.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Uncle Yura, seriously embarrassed. “It’s not like I’ve got any use for you either.”