Donald turned his head for a second and looked into Andrei’s face. It wasn’t clear what that was in his eyes—maybe derision, maybe distress—but at that moment he seemed very old to Andrei, very infirm and somehow haggard.
Andrei felt embarrassed and perplexed, but he immediately pulled himself together and repeated firmly, “Hand it in and tell them everything. Everything!”
“Do you realize those monkeys are headed for the City?” Donald asked.
“So what?” said Andrei, bewildered.
“Yes indeed—so what?” said Donald, and burst into grisly laughter.
2
The monkeys were already in the City. They were dashing along the cornices of buildings, dangling from lampposts like bunches of grapes, dancing at intersections in macabre, shaggy hordes, clinging to windows, flinging cobblestones torn up out of the road, and pursuing frenzied people who had fled into the streets in nothing but their underwear.
Donald stopped the truck several times to let fugitives up onto the back; the trash cans had been flung off a long time ago. Once a deranged horse, harnessed to a wagon, dashed across in front of the truck, but now there was no one sleeping in the wagon, bundled up in tarpaulin, not any longer; squatting in it, swaying to and fro, waving its massive, long, hairy arms about and wailing stridently, was a huge, burly, silvery baboon. Andrei saw the wagon crash straight into a lamppost and the horse go hurtling on, trailing the snapped traces behind it, while the baboon flitted jauntily across onto the nearest drainpipe and disappeared up onto the roof.
The square in front of City Hall was a seething vortex of panic. Vehicles drove up and drove away, policemen ran around, disoriented people wandered around in their underwear, and at the entrance some men had pressed some official or other up against the wall and were shouting at him, demanding something or other, while he tried to fend them off by jabbing with his cane and swinging his briefcase.
“What an unholy mess,” Donald said, and jumped out of the truck.
They ran into the building and immediately lost each other in a stupefying crowd of men in civilian clothing, men in police uniforms, and men in underclothes. The air was filled with the confused babble of innumerable voices, and the tobacco smoke made Andrei’s eyes smart.
“You’ve got to understand! I can’t, not like this—in nothing but my underpants!”
“. . . open the arsenal immediately and hand out guns . . . Damn it all, at least hand out guns to the police!”
“Where’s the chief of police? He was hanging around here just a moment ago . . .”
“My wife’s still in there, can’t you understand that? And my old mother-in-law!”
“Listen, it’s no big deal. After all, monkeys are just monkeys . . .”
“Just imagine it, I wake up and there’s someone sitting on the windowsill . . .”
“And where’s the chief of police? Still snoring in the sack, is he, the fat-ass?”
“We had one streetlamp in our alley. They knocked it down.”
“Kovalevsky! Room 20, quickly!”
“But surely you must agree that in just my underpants . . .”
“Who can drive? Drivers! Everyone out into the square, gather at the advertising column!”
“But where, damn it all, is the chief of police? Has he done a runner, the lousy bastard?”
“Right, listen up. You take some guys and get down to the foundry. Get those . . . you know, those rod things, for the park fencing . . . All of them, take them all! And get straight back here . . .”
“And I hammered that hairy face so hard, I broke my hand, I swear to God . . . And he yells, ‘God almighty! What are you doing? It’s me—Freddy!’ Total darned bedlam . . .”
“But are air rifles any good?”
“Three trucks to seventy-second district! Seventy-third district—five trucks . . .”
“Kindly give instructions for the issue of supplementary kit. Only it has to be signed for, so they’ll return it afterward!”
“Listen, have they really got tails? Or was I seeing things?”
Andrei was jostled, squeezed, and pressed up against the walls of the corridor, his feet were trampled black and blue, and he himself jostled people, squeezed through between them, and shouldered them aside. At first he looked for Donald, in order to be present as a witness for the defense at the confession and the handing-in of the gun, and then it hit home that the baboon invasion was obviously very serious business, if it had stirred up a hornet’s nest like this, and he immediately regretted that he couldn’t drive a truck, didn’t know where the foundry with the mysterious rods was, and couldn’t issue supplementary kit to anyone, and it seemed pretty much like he was no use to anyone here. He did at least attempt to inform people about what he had seen with his own eyes—maybe the information would prove useful—but some simply didn’t listen to him and others interrupted as soon as he began and started telling their own stories.
He realized with a heavy heart that there were no familiar faces in this eddying whirlpool of uniforms and underpants—he only caught a brief glimpse of Silva with his head bandaged up in a bloody rag before the black man instantly disappeared—but in the meantime measures of some kind were clearly being taken, someone was organizing someone else and sending him somewhere, the voices were getting louder and louder, sounding more and more confident, the underpants started disappearing little by little while the number of uniforms noticeably increased, and the moment came when Andrei even fancied that he heard the measured tramping of boots and a marching song, but it turned that someone had simply dropped the movable safe and it had gone tumbling and crashing down the stairs until it got stuck in the doorway of the Department of Foodstuffs . . .
And then Andrei did spot a familiar face: a functionary, a former colleague of his from the accounts department of the Office of Weights and Measures. Elbowing his way through people coming the other way, he overtook the functionary, pressed him back against the wall and blurted out in a single breath that he, Andrei Voronin—“Remember, we used to work together?”—was a garbage operative now; “I can’t find anyone, send me somewhere to do something, you must need people, surely . . .” The functionary listened for a while, blinking crazily and making feeble, convulsive attempts to break free, then suddenly he pushed Andrei away, yelling, “Where can I send you? Can’t you see I’m taking documents to be signed!”—and he took off down the corridor, almost running.
Andrei made several more attempts to participate in organized activity, but everyone rebuffed him or gave him the cold shoulder—everyone was in a terrible hurry; there was literally not a single person who was just standing there calmly and, say, drawing up a list of volunteers. With bitter resolve, Andrei started flinging open all the doors one after another, hoping to find someone or other in charge, someone who wasn’t running around, who wasn’t shouting and waving his arms about—even the most basic reasoning clearly indicated that somewhere around here there had to be something like a headquarters, a place from which all this feverish activity was being directed.
The first room was empty. In the second, one man in his underpants was shouting loudly into a telephone receiver and a second was cursing as he pulled on a regulation warehouse coat that was too tight. Protruding from under the coat was a pair of police breeches and ankle boots that had been patched over and over again, with no laces. Glancing into the third office, Andrei was lashed across the eyes by something pink with buttons and immediately recoiled, catching only a brief glimpse of a remarkably corpulent frame, clearly female. But in the fourth office he discovered the Mentor.
He was sitting on the windowsill with his feet pulled up, hugging his knees and looking out through the window into the darkness illuminated by the scudding light of headlamps. When Andrei came in, the Mentor turned a benign, florid face toward him, jerked his eyebrows up slightly, as he always did, and smiled. And at the sight of that smile, Andrei immediately calmed down. His rancorous anger faded away, and suddenly it was clear that everyth
ing was bound to sort itself out in the end; everything would fall into place and basically turn out just fine.
“Just look,” Andrei said, spreading his arms and smiling back. “It turns out that I’m no use to anyone. I can’t drive, I don’t know where the foundry is . . . I can’t understand a thing in all this crazy uproar.”
“Yes,” the Mentor agreed sympathetically. “It’s absolute mayhem.” He lowered his feet off the windowsill, stuck his hands under his thighs, and dangled his legs, like a child. “Quite unseemly, really. Even shameful. Serious adults, most of them experienced . . . So they’re not organized enough! Right, Andrei? So certain important matters have been allowed to slide. Inadequate preparedness, a lack of discipline . . . Well, and bureaucracy too, of course.”
“Yes!” said Andrei. “Of course! You know what I’ve decided? I’m going to stop trying to find anyone, or trying to figure anything out, I’m just going to grab some kind of stick and go. I’ll join a brigade. And if they won’t take me, I’ll go on my own. There are women left out there, after all . . . and children.”
The Mentor nodded briefly at every word Andrei said. He wasn’t smiling any longer; his expression was serious and sympathetic now.
“There’s just one thing,” said Andrei, pulling a wry face. “What to do about Donald?”
“Donald?” the Mentor echoed, raising his eyebrows. “Ah, Donald Cooper?” He laughed. “Of course, you think Donald Cooper must already have been arrested and repented of his sins . . . Nothing of the sort. At this precise moment Donald Cooper is organizing a brigade of volunteers to repel this brazen invasion, and of course he isn’t any kind of gangster and he hasn’t committed any crimes, and he got the gun on the black market in exchange for an old repeating watch. There’s nothing to be done. He’s spent his entire life with a gun in his pocket—he’s used to it!”
“Well, of course!” said Andrei, feeling tremendously relieved. “It’s obvious! I didn’t really believe it myself, it’s just that I thought . . . OK!” He swung around to leave, but stopped. “Tell me . . . if it’s not a secret, of course . . . Tell me, what’s all this for? Monkeys! Where have they come from? What are they supposed to prove?”
The Mentor sighed and slipped down off the windowsill. “There you go again, Andrei, asking me questions . . .”
“No! I understand everything, I do!” Andrei said with sincere feeling, pressing his hands to his heart. “I only . . .”
“Wait. There you go again, asking me questions to which I don’t have answers. You must understand that at last: I don’t have answers! The soil erosion under the buildings, remember that? The changing of water into bile . . . but then again, that was before your time . . . And now this—baboons . . . Remember, you used to keep quizzing me, asking how come—people of different nationalities, all speaking the same language and not even suspecting a thing. Remember how it astounded you, how perplexed you were, how you tried to prove to Kensi that he was speaking Russian, and Kensi tried to prove to you that you were speaking Japanese, remember? But now you’ve gotten used to it—those questions don’t even occur to you any longer. It’s one of the conditions of the Experiment. The Experiment is the Experiment, what else can I tell you?” He smiled. “Right, off you go, Andrei, off you go. Your place is out there. Action first and foremost. Each in his place, and each doing everything he can!”
And Andrei walked out—in fact, he didn’t walk, he darted—into the corridor, which had completely emptied now, and skittered down the front steps into the square, where he immediately spotted a serious-looking crowd around a truck under a lamppost and merged into it without the slightest hesitation: someone thrust a heavy metal picket into his hand, and he felt armed, strong, and ready for decisive battle.
A short distance away someone—a very familiar voice!—was issuing stentorian commands to line up in a column three across, and Andrei, holding his picket on his shoulder, ran that way and found himself a place between a burly Latino wearing suspenders over a nightshirt and a skinny, flaxen-haired intellectual type in a rumpled suit, who was in a terribly nervous state—he kept taking off his eyeglasses, breathing on the lenses, wiping them with a handkerchief, sticking them back on his nose, and adjusting them with his thumb and forefinger.
It was a small brigade, only about thirty men. And the one giving the commands turned out to be Fritz Heiger, which was rather galling in a way, but on the other hand Andrei had to admit that in this situation Fritz Heiger, although he might be a random leftover from the Nazi defeat, had shown up in exactly the right place.
As befitted a former noncommissioned officer of the Wehrmacht, his manner of expressing himself was forthright, and listening to him was quite repugnant. “Cov-errr ooff!” he yelled loud enough for the whole square to hear, as if he were commanding a regiment on tactical exercises. “Hey, you there, in the flip-flops! Yes, you! Pull your belly in! And you, the one with your legs spread like a cow after she’s been mounted! That applies to you too. Trail pikes! Not shoulder pikes, I said trail—you, the woman in suspenders! Ten-shun! Following me, forward . . . As you were! For-ward maarch!” They shuffled off raggedly.
Someone immediately stepped on Andrei’s heel from behind; he stumbled, shoved the intellectual type with his shoulder, and the intellectual type, of course, dropped the glasses that he was wiping yet again. “Clumsy clod!” Andrei said to him, losing his temper.
“Be careful!” the intellectual type whined in a shrill voice.
“For God’s sake!” Andrei helped him find his glasses, and when Fritz pounced on them, choking on his fury, Andrei told him to go to hell.
Andrei and the intellectual type, who kept thanking him nonstop as he stumbled along, caught up with the column and covered another twenty meters or so before they were all ordered to “board the trucks.” However, there was only one vehicle, a special truck for transporting wet cement. When they got on board they could feel it squelching and slopping about under their feet. The man in flip-flops clambered ponderously back out over the side and announced in a high voice that he wasn’t going anywhere on that truck. Fritz ordered him to get back onto the truck. The man protested in an even higher voice that he was wearing flip-flops and his feet were soaked. Fritz made mention of a pregnant swine. The man in the soaked flip-flops, not frightened in the least, protested that he certainly wasn’t a swine, that a swine might possibly agree to ride in that filth—he offered his profound apologies to all who had agreed to ride in this pigsty, but . . . At this point the Latino clambered down off the back of the truck, spat disdainfully at Fritz’s feet, stuck his thumbs under his suspenders, and strolled away at a leisurely pace.
Observing all this, Andrei experienced a certain malicious delight. Not that he approved of the actions of the man in flip-flops, let alone those of the Mexican—they had undeniably acted in an uncomradely manner and in general behaved like philistines—but it was extremely interesting to wait and see what our bruised and battered Unterleutnant would do now and how he would extricate himself from the situation that had arisen.
Andrei was obliged to admit that the bruised and battered Unterleutnant extricated himself with honor intact. Without saying a word, Fritz swung around on his heels, hopped up onto the running board beside the driver and commanded, “Let’s go!” The truck set off, and at that very moment someone switched on the sun.
Struggling to stay on his feet, constantly clutching at the men next to him, Andrei watched with his neck twisted around as the crimson disk slowly kindled to a blaze at its usual spot. First the disk trembled, seeming to pulsate, growing brighter and brighter, turning orange, then yellow, then white, and then it went out for an instant and immediately flared up again at full power, so bright that it was impossible to look at.
The new day had begun. The impenetrably black, starless sky turned a hazy light blue—sultry, with a breath of wind as hot as if it were blowing out of a desert. On all sides the City seemed to appear out of nothing—bright, colorful, streaked wit
h bluish shadows, huge and vast . . . Multiple stories heaped up on top of each other, buildings banked up above buildings, and not a single building was like any other, and the incandescent Yellow Wall could be seen, rising up and disappearing into the sky on the right, and on the left, in the openings above the roofs, an azure void appeared, as if the sea were over that way, and you instantly started feeling thirsty. Out of habit many of the men immediately looked at their watches. It was exactly eight o’clock.
They only drove for a short time. Apparently the monkey hordes hadn’t reached this area yet—the streets were quiet and deserted, as always at this early hour. Here and there in the buildings windows were being flung open and still-sleepy people were stretching drowsily and watching the truck indifferently. Women in nightcaps hung mattresses out across windowsills; on one of the balconies a wiry old man diligently performed his morning exercises in striped underpants, with his beard fluttering. The flood of panic hadn’t reached this far yet, but closer to the sixteenth district they started coming across the first fugitives—disheveled, not so much frightened as angry, some with bundles over their shoulders. When they caught sight of the truck, these people stopped, waved their arms, and shouted something. The truck roared as it turned onto Fourth Left Street, almost knocking down a very elderly couple pushing along a two-wheeled trolley with suitcases on it, and stopped. They all saw the baboons immediately.
The baboons were making themselves at home on Fourth Left Street, as if it were the jungle, or wherever it was they lived. With their tails curled into hooks, they shambled in slovenly crowds from sidewalk to sidewalk, bounded cheerfully along the cornices of buildings, swung from the lampposts, climbed up on advertising pillars and attentively searched themselves for lice, shouted to each other in booming voices, grimaced, fought, and made carefree, relaxed love. A gang of the silvery vandals was smashing up a food stall, two hooligans with tails were molesting a woman who was standing petrified in an entryway, white-faced with fear, and a shaggy-furred cutie, who had installed herself in a traffic controller’s booth, stuck her tongue out flirtatiously at Andrei. The warm wind carried along the street clouds of dust, feathers from eiderdowns, sheets of paper, clumps of fur, and the already established odor of a menagerie.