“Politics again!” shouted Selma, offended. She managed somehow to squeeze in between Izya and the colonel, and the old soldier paternally patted her little knee.
Andrei suddenly felt sad. He apologized into empty space, got up on numbed legs, and walked through into his study, where he sat on the windowsill, lit a cigarette, and started looking at the garden.
It was pitch dark in the garden, and the windows of the next cottage shone brightly through the black foliage. It was a warm night, with fireflies stirring in the grass. And what about tomorrow? Andrei thought. So I’ll go on the expedition, so I’ll reconnoiter . . . I’ll bring back a heap of guns, sort them out, hang them up . . . and then what?
In the dining room they were making a din. “Do you know this one, Colonel?” Izya yelled. “The Allied command is offering twenty thousand for Chapaev’s head!” And Andrei immediately remembered how it went on: “The Allied command, Your Excellency, could pay more. After all, they have the city of Guriev behind them, and Guriev has oil. Ha-ha-ha.”
“Chapaev?” the colonel asked. “Ah, that’s your cavalryman. But I think they executed him, didn’t they?”
Selma suddenly started singing in a high voice, “And next morning Katya was awoken by her mother . . . Get up, get up, Katya. The ships at anchor ride . . .” But she was immediately interrupted by Chachua’s velvety roar: “I brought you flowers . . . Oh, what wonderful flowers . . . You didn’t take those flowers from me. Why didn’t you take them?”
Andrei closed his eyes and suddenly remembered Uncle Yura with an unusually keen pang of yearning. Wang wasn’t here at the table, and Uncle Yura wasn’t here . . . And what the hell, I wonder, do I need this Dolfuss for? He was surrounded by ghosts.
Donald was sitting on the couch in his battered cowboy hat. He crossed one leg over the other and firmly clasped his fingers around his pointed knee. Grieve not in leaving, rejoice not in arriving . . . And Kensi sat down at the desk in his old police uniform, propping his elbow on the table and setting his chin on his fist. He looked at Andrei without condemnation, but there was no warmth in that glance either. And Uncle Yura kept slapping Wang on the back and intoning, “Never mind, Wang, don’t you grieve now, we’ll make you a minister, and you’ll ride around in a swanky ‘Victory’ automobile . . .” There was a familiar, heart-wrenching smell of coarse tobacco, healthy sweat, and moonshine. Andrei managed to catch his breath with an effort, rubbed his numbed cheeks, and looked at the garden again.
The Building was standing in the garden.
It stood there solidly and naturally among the trees, as if it had been there for a very long time, since forever, and it intended to stand there until the end of time: four stories of red brick, and just like the other time, the windows of the first floor were covered over with shutters, the roof was covered with galvanized sheeting, a flight of four stone steps led up to the door, and a strange, cross-shaped aerial stuck out beside the only chimney. But now all the Building’s windows were dark, in some places on the ground floor the shutters were missing and the windowpanes were streaked with dirt and cracked, in some places the panes had been replaced with warped sheets of plywood, and in some places they were crisscrossed with strips of paper. And there was no more solemn, somber music—a heavy, stifling silence crept out of the Building like an invisible mist.
Not taking even a second for reflection, Andrei flung his legs over the windowsill and jumped down into the garden, into the soft, thick grass. He walked over to the Building, frightening away the fireflies, burrowing deeper and deeper into the dead silence, keeping his eyes fixed on the familiar brass handle on the oak door, only now that handle was dull and covered in greenish splotches.
He walked up onto the porch and looked back. In the brightly lit windows of the dining room, human shadows merrily leaped about, twisting into fantastic poses, the sounds of dance music reached him faintly, and for some reason there was a clatter of knives and forks again. Dismissing all that, he turned away and took hold of the damp chased brass. The hallway was dimly lit, damp, and musty now; the branching coat stand protruded from the corner, as naked as a withered tree. There was no carpet on the marble stairway; there were no metal rods—all that was left on the steps were the green, tarnished rings, old yellowed cigarette butts, and some indefinite kind of trash. Treading heavily and hearing nothing but his own steps and his own breathing, Andrei slowly walked up to the top landing.
The long-extinct fireplace gave out a smell of old soot and ammonia, and something was stirring about in it with a faint rustling and scurrying. The immense hall was just as cold—he felt a draft on his legs—black, dusty rags hung down from the invisible ceiling, the marble walls were covered with dark, messy, suspicious-looking patches and glinted with dribbles of damp, the gold and purple had sloughed off them, and the haughtily modest busts of plaster, marble, bronze, and gold looked blindly out of their niches through clumps of dirty cobwebs. The parquet under Andrei’s feet creaked and yielded at every step, squares of moonlight lay on the littered floor, and ahead of him a gallery he had never been in before stretched onward and inward. And suddenly an entire swarm of rats shot out from beneath his feet, darted along the gallery with a pattering of paws, and disappeared into the darkness.
Where are they all? Andrei thought in confusion as he wandered along the gallery. What has become of them? he thought as he walked down rumbling iron steps into the musty inner depths. How did all this happen? he thought as he walked from room to room, with crumbled plaster crunching, broken glass squeaking, and dirt, covered in fluffy little mounds of mold, squelching under his feet . . . and there was a sweet smell of decomposition, and somewhere water was ticking, falling drop by drop, and on the tattered walls there were huge black pictures in mighty frames, but he couldn’t make out anything in them . . .
Now it will always be like this here, Andrei thought. I’ve done something—we’ve all done something—that means it will always be like this here. It won’t move from this spot again, it will stay here forever, it will rot and decay, like an ordinary dilapidated building, and in the end they’ll smash it apart with iron balls, they’ll burn the garbage, and take the burnt bricks off to the garbage dump . . . There isn’t a single voice. Not even a single sound, apart from rats squealing in despair in the corners . . .
He saw a huge cupboard with shelves and a rolling shutter and suddenly remembered there used to be a cupboard exactly like it standing in his little room—six square meters of floor space, with a single window looking out into an enclosed yard like a well shaft, and with the kitchen beside it. There were lots of old newspapers lying on the cupboard, and rolled-up posters that his father used to collect before the war, and some other old paper trash . . . and when a mousetrap smashed the face of a huge rat, it somehow managed to climb onto that cupboard and rustled and scrabbled up there for a long time, and every night Andrei was afraid that it would fall off onto his head, and one day he took a pair of binoculars and looked from a distance, from the windowsill, to see what was going on there, in among the paper. He saw—or did he imagine that he saw?—two jutting ears, a gray head, and an appalling bubble, gleaming as if it had been varnished, instead of a face. This was so terrifying that he darted out of his room and sat on the trunk in the corridor for a while, feeling the weakness and nausea inside him. He was alone in the apartment, there was no one there to make him feel embarrassed, but he was ashamed of his fear, and eventually he got up, went into the large room and put “Rio-Rita” on the gramophone . . . And a few days later a sweetish, nauseating smell appeared in his little room. The same smell as here . . .
In a vaulted chamber as deep as a well shaft he glimpsed the strange, surprising gleam of the leaden gray pipes of a huge organ, long since dead, cold, and dumb, like some abandoned graveyard of music. And close to the organ, beside the organist’s chair, a little man was lying, huddled up tight and shrouded in a ragged carpet, with an empty vodka bottle glinting by his head. Andrei realized that everythin
g really was over, and hurried back to the way out.
He walked down from the porch into his garden and saw Izya, who was exceptionally drunk and somehow especially disheveled and mussed. He was standing there, swaying, holding on to the trunk of an apple tree with one hand and looking at the Building. In the twilight his bared teeth glittered in a frozen smile.
“It’s over,” Andrei told him. “It’s the end.”
“The delirium of an agitated conscience!” Izya mumbled indistinctly.
“Nothing but rats running around,” said Andrei. “Rotten.”
“The delirium of an agitated conscience . . .” Izya repeated, and giggled.
PART V
1
Andrei suppressed the cramp in his stomach and swallowed the last spoonful of mush, then pushed his mess tin away with a feeling of revulsion and reached for his mug. The tea was still hot. Andrei wrapped his hand around the mug and started taking little sips, staring into the small, hissing flame of the gasoline lamp. The tea was unusually strong after standing for too long; it smelled like a birch-twig broom and it had a strange aftertaste, maybe from the cruddy water they’d collected after 820 kilometers, or maybe because Quejada had slipped his crappy remedy for diarrhea into all the command staff’s mugs again. Or maybe the mug simply hadn’t been properly washed—it felt especially greasy and sticky today.
In the street below his window he could hear the soldiers clattering their mess tins. The comic wit Tevosyan cracked some kind of gag about Skank and the soldiers started braying with laughter, but at that very moment Sergeant Vogel suddenly bellowed out in his Prussian voice, “Are you on your way to your post or to slip under the blanket with some woman, you low, creeping amphibian? Why are you barefoot? Where’s your footwear, you troglodyte?” A sullen voice responded that the troglodyte’s feet were chafed raw, and right through to the bone in some places. “Shut your mouth, you pregnant cow! Get those boots on immediately—and get to your post! Move it!”
Andrei wiggled the toes of his bare feet under the table, relishing the sensation. His feet had already recovered a bit on the cool parquet floor. If he just had a basin full of cold water . . . If he could stick his feet in it . . . He glanced into the mug. It was still half full of tea. To hell with it all, he thought, impulsively downing the remainder in three sensuous gulps. His stomach immediately started gurgling. For a while Andrei apprehensively listened to what was going on in there, then he put down the mug, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at the metal documents box. He ought to get out yesterday’s reports . . . I’m not in the mood. Right now I could just stretch out, snuggle up under my jacket, and grab an hour’s shut-eye . . .
Outside the window a tractor engine suddenly started furiously clattering. The remnants of glass in the window jangled, and a lump of plaster fell off the ceiling, landing beside the lamp. Trembling rapidly, the empty mug crept toward the edge of the table. Screwing up his entire face, Andrei got up, padded across to the window in his bare feet, and looked out.
He felt a breath of heat on his face from the street, which hadn’t cooled off yet, along with the caustic odor of exhaust fumes and the nauseating stench of heated oil. In the dusty light of a swiveling headlamp, bearded men were sitting right there in the road, lazily scrabbling in mess tins with spoons. All of them were barefoot, and almost all of them were naked to the waist. Their sweaty bodies gleamed white but their faces looked black, and their hands were black, as if they were all wearing gloves. Andrei suddenly realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. A troop of strange, unfamiliar naked monkeys. Sergeant Vogel stepped into the circle of light holding a huge aluminum kettle, and the monkeys immediately started excitedly fidgeting, jostling and holding out their mugs to the kettle. Pushing the mugs aside with his free hand, the sergeant started yelling, but Andrei could barely hear him above the rattling of the engine.
Andrei went back to the table, jerked open the lid of the box, and took out the logbook and yesterday’s reports. Another lump of plaster fell on the table from the ceiling. Andrei looked up. The room was immensely high—about four meters, or maybe even five. The molding on the ceiling had come away in places, so that he could see the lathwork, and that immediately aroused sweet memories of homemade jam pies, served with huge amounts of perfectly brewed, transparent tea in transparent, thin-walled glasses. With lemon. Or you could simply take an empty glass and collect as much pure, cold water as you wanted in the kitchen . . .
Andrei jerked his head, got up again, and walked obliquely right across the room to a huge bookcase. There was no glass in the doors, and there were no books either—just empty, dusty shelves. Andrei already knew that, but nonetheless he examined them one more time and even felt in the dark corners with his hand.
There was no denying the room was pretty well preserved. There were two perfectly decent armchairs in it, and another one with a torn seat of tooled leather that had once been luxurious. Several plain chairs stood in a row along the wall opposite the window, there was a little table with short legs in the middle of the room, and standing on the table was a cut-glass vase, with some sort of black, dried-up gunk inside it. The wallpaper had come loose on the walls, and even fallen away completely in some places, and the parquet floor had dried out and warped, but even so the room was in perfectly good condition—someone had lived here recently, no more than ten years ago.
It was the first time Andrei had seen such a well-preserved building since they passed the five-hundred-kilometer mark. After all those kilometers of neighborhoods burned to cinders and transformed into black, charred desert; after all those kilometers of continuous ruins, overgrown by prickly, brownish briars, and doddering, empty multistory boxes with collapsed floors absurdly towering up out of them; and kilometer after kilometer of waste lots, planted with rotten log-built houses with no roofs, where you could see right across the entire terrace from the road—from the Yellow Wall in the east to the edge of the precipice in the west—after all this, neighborhoods that were almost intact had appeared again, and a road paved with cobblestones, and perhaps there were people somewhere here—in any case, the colonel had ordered the sentries to be doubled.
I wonder how the colonel’s doing? The old man’s health has gone downhill a bit recently. But then, recently everyone’s health has gone downhill. It’s perfect timing that we’ll be spending the night under a roof for the first time in twelve days and not under the open sky. If we could just find water here, we could make this a long halt. Only it looks like there won’t be any water here either. At least, Izya says we shouldn’t count on finding any. Out of the whole herd of them, Izya and the colonel are the only ones who ever talk any sense.
There was a knock at the door, barely audible above the clatter of the tractor engine. Andrei hurried back to his seat, pulled on his jacket, opened the logbook, and barked, “Yes!”
It was only Duggan—a lean old man and a good match for his colonel: smoothly shaved, neat and tidy, every button fastened. “Permission to tidy up, sir?” he shouted.
Andrei nodded. Good God, he thought. What an effort it must take to keep yourself so smart in this shambles . . . And he isn’t even an officer, is he, not even a sergeant—he’s nothing but an orderly. A lackey. “How’s the colonel?” Andrei asked.
“Beg your pardon, sir?” Duggan froze, holding the dirty tableware in his hands, with one long, gristly ear turned toward Andrei.
“How is the colonel feeling?” Andrei roared, and that very second the engine outside fell silent.
“The colonel is drinking tea!” Duggan roared in the sudden silence, immediately adding in an embarrassed voice, “Beg your pardon, sir. The colonel is feeling passably well. He ate supper and now he is drinking tea.”
Andrei nodded absentmindedly and flipped over a few pages of the logbook.
“Will there be any instructions, sir?” Duggan inquired.
“No, thank you,” said Andrei.
When Duggan walked out, Andrei finally
got started on yesterday’s reports. Yesterday he hadn’t recorded anything at all; he’d had the runs so bad, he barely managed to sit through to the end of the evening reporting session, and afterward he was in torment half the night—squatting out in the middle of the road with his bare ass pointed toward the camp, tensely peering into the gloom and straining his ears to catch any sounds, with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Day 28,” he inscribed on a clean page, and underscored what he had written with two thick lines. Then he took Quejada’s report.
“Distance covered 28 kilometers,” he noted down. “Height of sun 63°51ʹ13ʺ.2 (at 979 km). Average temperature: in the shade +23°C, in the sun +31°C. Wind 2.5 m/sec, humidity 0.42. Gravity 0.998. Drilling carried out at 979, 981, 986 km. No water. Fuel consumption . . .” he took Ellisauer’s report, badly soiled by oil-stained fingers, and spent a long time trying to decipher the chicken-scratch writing.
“Fuel consumption: 1.32 of daily norm. Remaining at end of day 28: 3,200 kg. Condition of engines: No. 1, satisfactory; No. 2, worn wrist pins and problems with the cylinders . . .”
Andrei wasn’t able to decipher what exactly had happened to the cylinders, although he held the sheet of paper right up close to the flame of the lamp.
“Condition of personnel: physical condition—almost everyone has abrasions on the feet and the general diarrhea continues, the rash on Permyak’s and Palotti’s shoulders is getting worse. No wounded, no injuries. No exceptional incidents. Shark wolves appeared twice and were driven away by shooting. Munitions expended 12 cartridges. Water expended 40 L. Remaining at end of day 28—1,100 kg. Foodstuff expended 20 daily rations. Remaining at end of day 28: 730 daily rations.”