At that point Andrei finally pulled himself together with a horrendous effort, slapped his hand down on the desk, and said, “Will you please be quiet! Both of you! Please sit down, Mr. Paprikaki.”
Mr. Paprikaki sat down facing Kensi. No longer looking at anyone, he tugged a large checkered handkerchief out of his pocket and started mopping at his sweaty neck, his cheeks, the back of his head, and his Adam’s apple.
“Right, then . . .” said Andrei, leafing through the proofs. “We prepared a selection of ten letters—”
“It’s a biased selection!” Mr. Paprikaki immediately declared.
Kensi hit the roof. “Yesterday alone we received nine hundred letters about bread!” he bellowed. “And the tone was the same in all of them, if not harsher!”
“Just a moment!” said Andrei, raising his voice and slapping his hand down on the desk again. “Let me speak! And if you don’t want to, you can both go out in the corridor and carry on haggling there. Well now, Mr. Paprikaki, our selection is based on a thoroughgoing analysis of the letters received by our office. Mr. Ubukata is absolutely right. We are in possession of correspondence that is far harsher and far less restrained in tone. And furthermore, we have even included in the selection one letter that directly supports the government, although it was the only one of its kind in all the seven thousand letters that we—”
“I have no objection to that letter,” the censor interrupted.
“I should think not,” said Kensi. “You wrote it yourself.”
“That’s a lie!” the censor exclaimed in a squeal that screwed the rusty bolt back into that little depression under Andrei’s skull.
“Well, if not you then someone else from your mob,” said Kensi.
“You’re the blackmailer!” the censor shouted, breaking out in red blotches again. This was a strange outburst, and for a while there was silence.
Andrei picked through the proofs. “So far we have worked with you reasonably well, Mr. Paprikaki,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “I’m sure we just need to find a compromise of some kind now too.”
The censor flapped his cheeks. “Mr. Voronin!” he said soulfully. “What does all this have to do with me? Mr. Ubukata is an intemperate individual, always looking for a chance to vent his spleen, and he doesn’t care who he vents it on. But you must understand that I am acting strictly in accordance with my instructions. A rebellion is brewing in the City. The farmers are ready to launch a massacre at any moment. The police are unreliable. Do you really want blood? Conflagrations? I have children, I don’t want any of that. And you don’t want it either! At times like this the press should serve to alleviate the situation, not exacerbate it. That’s the official position, and I must say that I entirely agree with it. But even if I didn’t agree, I am obliged—it is my official responsibility . . . Only yesterday the censor of the Express was arrested for collusion, for aiding and abetting subversive elements.”
“I understand you perfectly, Mr. Paprikaki,” Andrei said with every last ounce of goodwill that he could muster. “But after all, you must see that the selection is perfectly moderate. And you must understand that precisely because these are such difficult times, we cannot act as the government’s yes-men. Precisely because there is a danger of insurgency by the déclassé elements and the farmers, we must do everything we can to bring the government to its senses. We are performing our duty, Mr. Paprikaki.”
“I won’t sign the selection,” Paprikaki said in a quiet voice.
Kensi swore in a whisper.
“We shall be forced to put the paper out without any sanction from you,” said Andrei.
“Oh, very good,” Paprikaki said wearily. “Very nice. Absolutely charming. The paper will be fined, I shall be arrested. The edition will be impounded. And you’ll be arrested too.”
Andrei picked up the broadsheet Under the Banner of Radical Rebirth and waved it under the censor’s nose. “And why don’t they arrest Fritz Heiger?” he asked. “How many censors of this little paper have been arrested?”
“I don’t know,” Paprikaki said in quiet despair. “What business is that of mine? They’ll get around to arresting Heiger too—he certainly has it coming.”
“Kensi,” said Andrei. “How much do we have in the kitty? Will it cover the fine?”
“We’ll take up a collection among the staff,” Kensi said briskly, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell the compositor to start typesetting the edition. We’ll scrape through somehow.” Kensi set off toward the door.
The censor sighed and blew his nose as he watched him go. “You’ve got no heart,” he muttered. “And no brains either. Greenhorns . . .”
Kensi stopped in the doorway. “Andrei,” he said. “If I were you, I’d go to City Hall and try pulling all the levers I can.”
“What levers?” Andrei inquired morosely.
Kensi immediately came back to the desk. “Go to the deputy political consultant. After all, he’s Russian too. You used to drink vodka with him.”
“And I used to smash his face too,” Andrei said cheerlessly.
“That’s OK, he doesn’t bear grudges,” said Kensi, “and then, I know for certain that he’s on the take.”
“Who isn’t on the take in City Hall?” said Andrei. “That’s not the problem, is it?” he sighed. “OK, I’ll go. Maybe I’ll find out something . . . But what are we going to do about Paprikaki? He’ll just go running off and call in—you will, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Paprikaki agreed without any great enthusiasm.
“I’ll tie him up right now and dump him behind the safe!” said Kensi, his teeth glinting in a grin of delight.
“Don’t get carried away, now,” said Andrei. “Tying him up, dumping him . . . Just lock him in the archive room, there’s no phone in there.”
“That would be coercion,” Paprikaki remarked in a dignified voice.
“And if they arrest you, won’t that be coercion?”
“Well, I’m not actually objecting!” said Paprikaki. “It was just a comment.”
“Go on, Andrei, go on,” Kensi said impatiently. “I’ll see to everything here while you’re gone, don’t worry.”
Andrei got up with a grunt, shambled over to the coat stand, dragging his feet, and took his raincoat. His beret had disappeared, and he searched for it on the floor, among the galoshes forgotten by visitors in the good old days, but failed to find it, swore abruptly, and walked out into the front office. The weedy secretary cast a rapid glance at him with her frightened gray eyes. Scraggy little slut. What was it that her name was?
“I’m going to City Hall,” he said morosely.
Out in the newsroom everything seemed to be carrying on as usual. People yelling on the phone, people perching on the edges of desks writing something, people examining damp photographs and drinking coffee, office boys dashing about with files and documents. The whole area was thick with smoke and littered with trash, and the head of the literary section, a phenomenal ass in a gold pince-nez, a former draftsman from some quasi-state or other like Andorra, was holding forth pompously to a mournful-looking author: “There are places where you’ve tried too hard, places where you lack a sense of measure, where the material has proved too powerful and volatile for you . . .”
A good kick right on the ass, and again, and again, Andrei thought as he walked by. He suddenly recalled how dear to his heart all this had been only a very short time ago, how new and fascinating! How challenging, necessary, and important it had all seemed . . . “Boss, just a moment,” shouted Denny Lee, the head of the letters department, all set to dash after him, but Andrei just waved him away without even looking back. Right on the ass, and again, and again . . .
Once outside the door, he stopped and turned up the collar of his raincoat. Carts were still rumbling along the street—and all in the same direction, toward the center of the City, toward City Hall. Andrei thrust his hands as deep into his pockets as he could and set off in the same direction, slouching over. Ab
out two minutes later he noticed he was walking along beside a monstrously huge cart with wheels the height of a man. The cart was being drawn along by two gigantic cart horses that were obviously tired after a long journey. He couldn’t see the load in the cart behind the high wooden sides, but he did have a good view of the driver at the front—or, rather, not so much the driver as his colossal tarpaulin raincoat with a three-cornered hood. All Andrei could make out of the driver himself was a beard jutting forward, and through the creaking of the wheels and clatter of hooves, he could hear the driver making incomprehensible sounds of some kind: he was either urging on his horses or releasing excess gas in his simpleminded country manner.
He’s going into the City too, thought Andrei. What for? What do they all want here? They won’t get any bread here, and they don’t need bread anyway—they’ve got bread. They’ve got everything, in fact, not like us city folks. They’ve even got guns. Do they really want to start a massacre? Makhno’s peasant anarchists . . . Maybe they do. Only what will they get out of it? A chance to pillage the apartments? I don’t understand a thing.
He remembered the interview with the farmers, and how disappointed Kensi had been with it, even though he did it himself, questioning almost fifty peasants on the square in front of City Hall. “What the people think, that’s what we’re for”; “Well, I had a bellyful, you know, sitting out there in the swamps—why don’t I take a trip, I thought . . .”; “You said it, mister, why are the people all piling in, what for? We’re as surprised as anyone . . .”; “Well, I see everyone’s going into the City. So I came into the City. I’m as good as the rest, ain’t I?”; “The machine gun? How could I manage without the machine gun? In our parts you can’t set one foot in front of the other without a machine gun . . .”; “I come out to milk the cows this morning and I see they’re all going. Syomka Kostylin’s going, Jacques-François is going, that . . . what’s-his-name . . . ah, darn it, I’m always forgetting what he’s called, lives out beyond Louse Head Hill . . . He’s going too! I ask, where’re you going, guys? Look here, they say, there’s been no sun for seven days, we ought to pay the City a visit . . .”; “Well, you ask the bosses that. The bosses know everything”; “They said, didn’t they, they were going to give us automatic tractors! So we could sit at home, scratching our bellies, and it would do the work for us . . . More than two years now they’ve been promising . . .”
Evasive, vague, unclear. Ominous. Either they were simply being cunning, or they were all being whisked together in a heap by some kind of instinct, or maybe some kind of secret, well-camouflaged organization . . . So what was it . . . peasant insurrection, like the Jacquerie? Maybe like the Tambov partisan army? In some ways he could understand them: there hadn’t been any sun for twelve days now, the harvest was going to ruin, no one knew what was going to happen. They’d been blown off their warm, comfortable perches . . .
Andrei passed a short, quiet line of people waiting outside a meat market, then another line outside a bakery. Most of the people standing there were women, and for some reason many of them had white armbands on their sleeves. Of course, Andrei immediately thought of the events of Saint Bartholomew’s Eve—then it occurred to him that it was daytime now, not nighttime; it was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the stores were still closed. Three policemen were standing bunched together on a corner, below the neon sign of the Quisisana Night Café. They looked strange somehow—uncertain, was that it? Andrei slowed down, listening.
“So now what do we do, will they order us in to fight them? Why, there’s twice as many of them.”
“We’ll just go and report: there’s no way through there and that’s it.”
“And he’ll say, ‘How come there’s no way through? You’re the police.’”
“The police—so what? We’re the police, and they’re the militia . . .”
So there’s some kind of militia now, Andrei thought as he walked on. I don’t know any militia . . . He passed another line of people and turned onto Main Street. Up ahead he could already see the bright mercury lamps of Central Square, its wide-open space completely filled with something gray that was stirring about, enveloped in steam or smoke, but just then he was stopped.
A big, strapping young man—or, rather, a youth, an overgrown juvenile, wearing a flat peaked cap pulled down right over his eyes, blocked the way and asked in a low voice, “Where are you going, sir?”
The youth held his hands at his sides, with white armbands on both sleeves, and several other men, all very different but also with white armbands, were standing by the wall behind him.
Out of the corner of his eye Andrei noticed that the countryman in the tarpaulin raincoat drove straight on unhindered in his unwieldy cart.
“I’m going to City Hall,” Andrei said when he was forced to stop. “What’s the problem?”
“To City Hall?” the youth repeated loudly, glancing back over his shoulder at his comrades. Two other men detached themselves from the wall and walked up to Andrei.
“Do you mind if I ask what you’re going to City Hall for?” inquired a stocky man with unshaven cheeks, wearing greasy overalls and a helmet with the letters G and M on it. He had a vigorous, muscular face with cold, piercing eyes.
“Who are you?” asked Andrei, feeling in his pocket for the brass kitchen pestle he had been carrying for four days now because the times were so uncertain.
“We’re the voluntary militia,” the stocky man replied. “What business have you got in City Hall? Who are you?”
“I’m the senior editor of the City Gazette,” Andrei said angrily, clutching the pestle tightly in his hand. He didn’t like the way the juvenile approached him from the left while he was speaking and the third volunteer militiaman, another young guy who was obviously strong too, wheezed into his ear from the right. “I’m going to City Hall to protest against the actions of the censor.”
“Ah,” the stocky man said in an indefinite tone of voice. “I see. Only why go to City Hall? You could arrest the censor and put out your newspaper, no bother.”
Andrei decided to act brazenly for the time being. “Don’t you go telling me what to do,” he said. “We’ve already arrested the censor without any advice from you. Anyway, just let me through.”
“A representative of the press . . .” growled the one who was wheezing in his right ear.
“Why not? Let him go in,” the youth on Andrei’s left said condescendingly.
“Yes,” said the stocky man. “Let him go in. Only don’t let him try to blame us afterward . . . Have you got a gun?”
“No,” said Andrei.
“That’s a mistake,” said the stocky man, stepping aside. “Go on through.”
Andrei walked through. Behind him he heard the stocky man say in a high, squeaky voice, “Jasmine is a pretty little flower! And it smells very good too . . .” and the militiamen laughed. Andrei knew that little rhyme, and he felt an angry urge to turn back, but he only lengthened his stride.
There were quite a lot of people on Main Street. Most of them were sticking close to the walls or standing bunched together in courtyard entrances, and they all had white armbands. A few were loitering in the middle of the road, approaching the farmers driving past and telling them something before the farmers drove on. The stores were all closed, but there were no lines in front of them. Outside one bakery an elderly militiaman with a knotty walking stick was trying to get through to an old woman who was standing on her own: “I assure you quite definitely, madam. The stores will not open today. I myself am the owner of a grocery store, madam—I know what I’m talking about.” But the old biddy replied in a screechy voice to the effect that she would die right here on these steps before she gave up her place in line . . .
Trying hard to smother his mounting sense of alarm and a strange feeling that everything around him was somehow unreal—it was all like in a movie—Andrei reached the square. Where the mouth of Main Street opened out onto the square, it was choked with carts great
and small, farm wagons and drays. The air stank of horse sweat and fresh dung, and horses of every shape and size swung their heads to and fro, while the sons of the swamps shouted to each other in deep, loud voices and crude hand-rolled cigarettes glimmered on all sides. Andrei caught the smell of smoke—somewhere nearby they were lighting a campfire. A fat man with a mustache and a cowboy hat came out of an archway, buttoning up his fly as he walked, and almost ran into Andrei. The man swore good-naturedly and started picking his way between the carts, calling out in a barking voice to someone named Sidor: “Come this way, Sidor! Into the yard, you can do it there! Only watch your step, don’t put your foot in it!”
Biting on his lip, Andrei walked on. At the very entrance to the square the carts were already standing on the sidewalk. Many of the horses had been unharnessed and hobbled, and they were shuffling around, sniffing dejectedly at the asphalt. In the carts people were sleeping, smoking, and eating—Andrei could hear the appetizing sounds of liquid glugging and lips smacking. He climbed up onto the porch of a building and looked across the vast camp. It was only about fifty paces to City Hall, but it was a maze. Campfires crackled and smoked, and the smoke, tinted gray-blue by the mercury lamps, drifted over the covered wagons and massive carts and was drawn into Main Street, as if into some gigantic chimney. Some motherfucker buzzed as it settled on Andrei’s neck and bit, like a pin being thrust into his skin. With a feeling of loathing Andrei swatted something large and prickly that crunched juicily under his palm. They’ve dragged all the damned bugs in with them from the swamps, he thought angrily, catching a distinct whiff of ammonia coming from under the building’s half-open front door. Jumping down onto the sidewalk, he set off decisively into the maze of horses, stepping in something soft and crumbly in his first few strides.
The ponderous, rounded form of City Hall towered up over the square like a five-story bastion. Most of the windows were dark, with only a few lit up, and the elevator shafts set on the outside of the walls glowed a dim yellow. The farmers’ camp surrounded the building in a ring, and between the carts and City Hall there was an empty space, illuminated by bright streetlamps on fancy cast-iron columns. Farmers, almost all of them armed, were jostling together under the streetlamps, and at the entrance to City Hall a line of policemen stood facing them, their badges of rank indicating that they were mostly sergeants and officers.