“The struggle for survival,” Andrei said with a crooked grin. “What sort of life is there now?”
“That will depend on you.”
“And on you?”
“Not much depends on us. There are many of you. We don’t decide everything here, you do.”
“That isn’t what you used to say before,” said Andrei.
“You were different before too!” the Mentor objected. “And you spoke differently!”
“I’m afraid I acted like a fool,” Andrei said slowly. “I’m afraid I was simply stupid.”
“That’s not all you’re afraid of,” the Mentor remarked in a sly tone of voice.
Andrei’s heart stood still, the way it does when you fall in a dream. And he answered harshly, “Yes, I am afraid. Afraid of everything. A real scaredy-cat. Has anyone ever kicked you repeatedly in the crotch with his boot?” A new idea suddenly occurred to him. “And you’re afraid yourself, aren’t you? Eh?”
“Of course! Didn’t I tell you the Experiment had run out of control—”
“Ah, come off it! The Experiment, the Experiment. It’s not a matter of the Experiment. First the baboons, then us, and then you—isn’t that right?”
The Mentor didn’t answer. The most terrible thing of all was that the Mentor didn’t say even a single word in reply. Andrei carried on waiting, but the Mentor merely prowled around the hallway without speaking, aimlessly shifting chairs from one spot to another and wiping the dust off tables with his sleeve, without even looking at Andrei.
Someone knocked on the door with a fist, and then immediately started kicking it. Andrei drew back the bolt and saw Selma standing there. “You abandoned me!” she said indignantly. “I almost couldn’t fight my way through!”
Andrei glanced around in embarrassment. The Mentor had disappeared. “I’m sorry,” said Andrei. “I had other things on my mind.”
It was hard for him to speak. He was trying to suppress a terrifying sense of loneliness and vulnerability. He slammed the door shut with a crash and hastily slid the bolt home.
3
The offices were empty. The staff had obviously fled when the shooting started up around City Hall. Andrei walked through the rooms, indifferently surveying the scattered sheets of paper and overturned chairs, the dirty plates with the remains of sandwiches and cups with the remains of coffee. Loud, rousing music was coming from somewhere farther inside, and that was strange. Selma plodded after him, holding on to his sleeve. She kept saying something over and over, something shrewish, but Andrei wasn’t listening to her. What did I come here for, he thought. They’ve all bolted, every last one of them, and they were right. I should be safe at home now, lying in bed, hugging my poor battered side and dozing, not giving a rotten damn for any of this . . .
At first he didn’t realize it was Izya. Standing at the table farthest away, in the corner, stooped over an open binder of back issues and propping himself up on hands set wide apart, was a stranger with his hair carelessly trimmed in wedges, wearing a suspicious-looking gray garment with no buttons, and it was only when this man suddenly grinned in a familiar way a moment later and started plucking at a wart on his neck with a familiar gesture that Andrei realized he was looking at Izya.
Andrei stood in the doorway for a while, watching him. Izya hadn’t heard Andrei come in. He couldn’t hear or notice a thing—first, he was reading, and second, a loudspeaker hanging directly above his head was blasting out the thunderous jangling of a victorious march. Then Selma exclaimed in an appalling wail, “Oh, look, it’s Izya!” and she darted forward, pushing Andrei aside.
Izya quickly looked up and spread out his arms, grinning even more broadly. “Aha!” he yelled delightedly. “So here you are!”
While Izya hugged Selma, delightedly smothering her cheeks and lips in kisses, while Selma squealed something unintelligible and ecstatic and ruffled up Izya’s ugly hair, Andrei walked across to them, struggling to overcome his acute sense of awkwardness. The searing feeling of guilt and betrayal that had almost knocked him off his feet that morning in the basement had been blunted and almost forgotten over the last year, but now it transfixed him again, and after he got close, he hesitated for a few seconds before daring to hold out his hand. He would have found it perfectly natural if Izya had ignored this hand of his, or even said something witheringly contemptuous—that was probably exactly what Andrei would have done. But Izya freed himself from Selma’s embrace, grabbed Andrei’s hand with eager passion, shook it, and asked with keen interest, “Where did they give you that beautiful shiner?”
“I was beaten,” Andrei replied tersely. He was astounded by Izya. There were many things he wanted to tell him, but all he did was ask, “So how come you’re here?”
Instead of answering, Izya flipped over several pages of the bound newspapers and gestured in exaggerated fashion as he declaimed with gusto, “‘. . . No rational arguments can possibly explain the fury with which the government press attacks the Party of Radical Rebirth. But if we recall that it is precisely the PRR—this tiny, young organization—that speaks out most uncompromisingly against every case of corruption—’”
“Drop it,” said Andrei, wrinkling up his face, but Izya merely raised his voice.
“‘—lawlessness, administrative stupidity, and shiftlessness; if we recall that it was precisely the PRR that brought up the Widow Batton case, if we recall that the PRR was the first party to warn the government of the futility of the swamplands tax . . .’ Belinsky! Pisarev! Plekhanov! Did you write this yourself, or was it your idiots?”
“OK, OK . . .” said Andrei, starting to get annoyed, and he tried to take the binder away from Izya.
“No, wait!” shouted Izya, wagging his finger at Andrei and tugging the binder toward himself. “Here is yet another pearl! . . . Where is it now? . . . Ah, yes. ‘Our City has a wealth of honest people, like any city populated by working folk. However, when it comes to political factions, surely Fritz Heiger is the only one who can lay claim to the exalted title—’”
“That’s enough!” Andrei yelled, but Izya tore the binder out of his hands, darted behind Selma, who was exultant, and continued from there, still plucking and spraying.
“‘Let us not speak of words, let us speak of deeds! Friedrich Heiger rejected the post of minister of information; Friedrich Heiger voted against a law providing major privileges to distinguished employees of the Public Prosecutor’s Office; Friedrich Heiger was the only eminent public figure to oppose the creation of a regular army, in which he was offered a senior position . . .’” Izya flung the binder under the desk and rubbed his hands together. “You always were an incredible ass in politics! But in the last few months, you’ve become catastrophically more stupid. You deserve that ornament on your noggin! Is your eye still in one piece at least?”
“Yes, my eye’s still in one piece,” Andrei said slowly. He had only just noticed that Izya moved his left arm kind of awkwardly, and three fingers on his left hand didn’t bend at all.
“Will you turn off that damned noise!” roared Kensi, appearing in the doorway. “Ah, Andrei, you’re here already . . . That’s good. Hello, Selma!” He dashed across the room and jerked the plug of the speaker out of its socket.
“What did you do that for?” Izya shouted. “I want to hear the speeches of my leaders! Let the martial music thunder forth!”
Kensi merely cast a furious glance at him. “Andrei, let’s go, I’ll tell you what we’ve done,” he said. “And we have to think about what to do next.”
His face and hands were covered in soot. He dashed out and Andrei dashed after him, realizing for the first time that the offices smelled of burnt paper. Izya and Selma followed behind.
“A general amnesty!” Izya told her, hissing and gurgling. “The great leader has flung open the doors of the prisons! He needed the space for different prisoners.” He whooped and groaned. “Every single criminal has been set free, and we all know what a criminal I am, don’t we? Even the
lifers have been let out.”
“You’ve gotten thin,” Selma said in a voice filled with pity. “Your clothes are hanging off you, you’ve turned kind of mangy . . .”
“Well, at the end—for the last three days—they didn’t give us any food, or let us get washed.”
“So you must be hungry, then?”
“No, not a damn bit—I stuffed myself full in here.”
They walked into Andrei’s office. It was appallingly hot in there: the sun was shining straight in the window and the fireplace was blazing fiercely. Andrei’s little floozy of a secretary was squatting in front of the fireplace, as smutty-faced as Kensi, stirring a heap of burning paper with a poker. Everything in the office was covered in soot and black clumps of paper ash.
When she saw Andrei, his secretary jumped up and gave him a frightened, ingratiating smile. She’s the last person I expected to stay, thought Andrei. He sat down at his desk, feeling guilty, and forced himself to nod and smile back at her.
“Lists of all the special correspondents, names and addresses of members of the editorial board,” Kensi ticked off briskly. “The originals of all political articles, the originals of weekly reviews . . .”
“Dupain’s articles have to be burned,” said Andrei. “He was our greatest opponent of the PRR, I think.”
“Burned already,” Kensi said impatiently. “Dupain, and Filimonov too, just to be on the safe side . . .”
“Why are you making all this fuss?” Izya asked merrily. “They’ll carry you shoulder high.”
“That all depends,” Andrei said morosely.
“What do you mean, it all depends? Want to bet on it? A hundred finger flicks!”
“Just hang on, will you, Izya!” said Kensi. “For God’s sake shut up for ten minutes at least! I’ve destroyed all the correspondence with City Hall, but left the correspondence with Heiger for the time being . . .”
“The minutes of the editorial board!” Andrei suddenly remembered. “For the last month . . .” He hastily reached into the bottom drawer of the desk, took out a file, and handed it to Kensi, who winced as he leafed through a few pages.
“Right, right . . .” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot about that . . . This has Dupain’s speech in it.” He took a step toward the fireplace and flung the file into the fire. “Keep stirring, keep stirring,” he testily ordered the secretary, who was listening open-mouthed to her bosses.
The head of the letters section appeared in the doorway, looking sweaty and very agitated. He was lugging a heap of files in his arms, pressing them down with his chin. “There,” he panted, dumping the heap beside the fireplace with a heavy thud. “There are some opinion polls here, I didn’t even try to sort them out . . . I could see names, addresses . . . My God, boss, what happened to you?”
“Hi, Denny,” said Andrei, “thanks for staying.”
“Is your eye OK?” asked Denny, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Izya reassured him. “You’re destroying all the wrong stuff,” he declared. “No one’s going to touch you, are they? You’re a yellowish liberal opposition newspaper. You’ll just stop being liberal and oppositionist . . .”
“Izya,” said Kensi. “I’m asking you for the last time: stop gabbling or I’ll throw you out.”
“But I’m not gabbling!” Izya exclaimed in annoyance. “Let me finish! The letters, destroy the letters. Some intelligent people probably wrote to you . . .”
Kensi gaped at him. “Dammit!” he hissed, and darted out of the office. Denny raced after him, still wiping his face and neck as he went.
“You don’t understand a thing,” said Izya. “All of you here are cretins. And it’s not only intelligent people who are in danger.”
“Cretins is what we are,” said Andrei. “You’re right there.”
“Aha! You’re getting brighter!” Izya exclaimed, waving his mutilated arm about. “You shouldn’t. It’s dangerous. That’s what so tragic about the whole thing. Many, many people will get a bit brighter now, but not bright enough. They won’t realize in time that this is when they should pretend to be fools.”
Andrei looked at Selma. Selma was gazing admiringly at Izya. And the secretary was gazing admiringly at Izya too. And Izya was standing there with his feet set wide apart in their prison shoes, unshaven and dirty, a total mess, with his shirt sticking out of his trousers, because there weren’t enough buttons on the fly—standing there in all his glory, still the same as ever, not changed in the least—and pontificating and sermonizing. Andrei got up from his desk, walked over to the fireplace, squatted down beside the secretary, took the poker from her, and started stirring and turning the reluctantly burning paper.
“And so,” Izya sermonized, “you have to destroy not just the letters that abuse our leader. There are different ways of abusing someone. You have to destroy the letters written by intelligent people!”
Kensi stuck his head into the office and shouted, “Listen, someone give us a hand . . . Girls, why are you just hanging around in here, come on, follow me!”
The secretary immediately jumped up and ran out, straightening out her little skirt that had twisted around. Selma stood there for a moment, as if expecting someone to stop her, then stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and walked out too.
“But no one will touch you!” Izya carried on pontificating, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, like a wood grouse singing his mating song. “They’ll say thank you to you, toss you more paper so you can increase your print run, raise your salaries, and give you more staff. But afterward, if you suddenly take it into your heads to get uppity, that’s when they’ll grab you by the balls, and then you can be sure they’ll remind you about everything—that Dupain of yours, and that Filimonov, and all your liberal opposition ravings. Only why would you want to get uppity? You won’t even think of getting uppity—on the contrary!”
“Izya,” said Andrei, looking into the flames. “Why didn’t you tell me what you had in that file?”
“What? In what file? Ah, in that file . . .” Izya suddenly turned quiet, came over to the fireplace, and squatted down beside Andrei.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Andrei said, “Of course, I was a stupid jackass then. An absolute blockhead. But I’ve never been a rumormonger and gossip. You ought to have realized that then . . .”
“In the first place, you weren’t a blockhead,” said Izya. “You were worse. You were zombified. It was impossible to talk to you like a human being. I know, I was like that for a long time myself . . . And then—what have rumors got to do with it? You must admit that simple citizens really shouldn’t know that kind of thing. That way the whole damn shooting match could go to hell.”
“What?” Andrei asked, confused. “Because of your little love letters?”
“What little love letters?”
For a while they gazed into each other’s eyes in astonishment. Then Izya grinned. “Oh Lord, of course . . . What made me think he’d tell you all that? Why would he tell you? He’s our soaring eagle, our leader! He who controls information, controls the world—he learned that lesson well from me!”
“I don’t understand a thing,” Andrei muttered almost despairingly. But he could sense that he was about to learn something loathsome about this already loathsome business. “What are you talking about? Who is he? Heiger?”
“Heiger, Heiger,” said Izya, nodding. “Our great Fritz . . . So it was love letters I had in the file, then? Or maybe compromising photographs? The jealous widow and the womanizer Katzman . . . That’s right, that’s what the record I signed said too.” Izya got up with a croak and started walking around the office, rubbing his hands together and giggling.
“Yes,” said Andrei. “That’s what he told me. The jealous widow. So it was all lies?”
“Well of course, what did you think?”
“I believed it,” Andrei said curtly. He clenched his teeth and started frenziedly stirring the poker in the hearth. ?
??And what was really in the file?” he asked.
Izya didn’t answer. Andrei glanced around. Izya was standing there, slowly rubbing his hands together, looking at Andrei with a frozen smile and glassy eyes. “Now that’s interesting . . .” he said uncertainly. “Maybe he simply forgot? That is, not exactly forgot . . .” He suddenly darted over and squatted down beside Andrei again. “Listen, I’m not going to tell you anything, got that? And if they ask you, that’s what you say: he didn’t tell me anything, he refused. All he said was that it was to do with some big secret of the Experiment; he said it was dangerous to know the secret. And he also showed me several sealed envelopes and explained with a wink that he was going to deliver those envelopes to reliable people, and the envelopes would be opened if he, Katzman, were arrested or, let’s say, his life came to a sudden end. Do you understand? He didn’t name the reliable people. That’s what you tell them, if they ask.”
“All right,” Andrei said slowly, looking into the flames.
“That will be the right thing,” said Izya, also looking into the flames. “It’s just that, if they beat you . . . That Ruhmer’s a real bastard, you know.” Izya shuddered. “And maybe no one will ask. I don’t know. It all needs thinking over. I can’t figure everything out at once.”
He stopped speaking. Andrei was still stirring the hot pile with its shimmering red flames, and after a while Izya started tossing files full of papers into the hearth. “Don’t throw the files themselves in,” said Andrei. “Look, they don’t burn well . . . But aren’t you afraid they’ll find that file?”
“What should I be afraid of?” said Izya. “Let Heiger be afraid . . . And they won’t find it now if they didn’t find it immediately. I tossed it into a manhole, and then I kept wondering if I’d missed or not . . . But what did they work you over for? I thought you and Fritz were on excellent terms.”
“It wasn’t Fritz,” Andrei said reluctantly. “I was just unlucky.”
The women and Kensi barged noisily into the room, lugging an entire mound of letters on a stretched-out raincoat. Denny walked in after them, still wiping away his sweat. “Well, I think that’s all now,” he said. “Or have you come up with something else?”