Upstairs something tumbled over with a heavy, rumbling crash, and Izya yelled, articulating in a clear voice, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing, God almighty!” There was a laugh and the voices started murmuring again.
Rummage away, rummage away, Andrei thought to himself. You’re our only hope. You’re the only ones we can expect to come up with anything . . . And all that will come out of this wild goose chase will be my report and Izya’s twenty-four crates of documents!
He stretched out his legs and leaned back onto the steps, propping himself on his elbows. The Mute suddenly sneezed, and an echo replied clearly and brightly. Andrei threw back his head and started looking at the distant vaulted ceiling. They built well here, with style, better than us. And they obviously had a pretty good life too. But they still vanished anyway . . . Fritz won’t like all this at all—of course, he’d prefer a potential enemy. Or else what do we get? They lived here, they built here, they glorified some Heiger of their own . . . the Kindest and Simplest . . . And what’s the result? An empty void. As if no one had ever been here. Nothing but bones, and not very many of those for a population this large . . . So there you have it, Mr. President! Man proposes, but God sends down some mysterious shimmering. End of story.
He sneezed too and sniffed. It’s kind of cool in here . . . And it would be a good idea to have Quejada indicted when we get back . . . Andrei readily slipped into his habitual line of thought: how to pen Quejada into a corner so that he wouldn’t dare to open his mouth, how to make sure all the documentation was as clear as day and Heiger would immediately understand everything . . . But he put these thoughts aside—this was the wrong place and the wrong time. Right now he should only be thinking about tomorrow. And a bit of thinking about today wouldn’t do any harm. For instance, where did that statue go to, after all? Someone with horns on his head, some kind of stegosaur, came along, tucked it under his arm, and carried it away. What for? And it happens to weigh about fifty tons, by the way. If a beast like that wanted to, it could carry off a tractor under its arm. We’ve got to get away from here, that’s the point. If not for the colonel, we’d have pulled up stakes and moved out today . . . He started thinking about the colonel, and suddenly realized he was listening to something.
Some kind of vague, distant sound had appeared—not voices; the voices upstairs were still droning in the same way. No, out there in the street, outside the tall entrance doors standing ajar. The colored glass in the windows started audibly clinking and the stone steps under his elbows and backside started palpably vibrating, as if there were a railroad somewhere nearby and a train were rolling along it right now—a heavy freight train. The Mute suddenly opened his eyes wide and turned his head, listening warily.
Andrei cautiously pulled in his legs and got up, holding his automatic by the strap. The Mute immediately got up too, still listening and squinting sideways at Andrei with one eye.
Holding his weapon at the ready, Andrei silently ran to the doors and warily glanced out. The hot, dusty air scorched his face. The street was as yellow, scorching hot, and empty as before. Only the cotton-wool silence had disappeared. A huge, distant hammer was pounding on the road with dreary regularity, and the blows were clearly moving closer—heavy, crisp blows, crushing the cobblestones of the road into small fragments.
In the building across the street the cracked store window collapsed in a jangling shower of glass. Andrei started back in surprise, but immediately pulled himself together and drew back the bolt of his automatic, biting on his lip. Why the hell did I ever come here? some corner of his mind thought.
The hammer kept moving closer. It was absolutely impossible to tell which direction it was approaching from, but the blows grew heavier and heavier, crisper and crisper, and they had a strange, relentless ring to them, ineluctable and triumphal. The footsteps of fate, Andrei thought fleetingly. He looked around in confusion at the Mute.
He got a shock. The Mute was standing there, leaning his shoulder against the wall, focusing intently on trimming the nail on the little finger of his right hand with his machete. And he looked absolutely indifferent, even bored.
“What?” Andrei asked hoarsely. “What are you doing?”
The Mute looked at him, nodded, and went back to working on his fingernail. Boooom, boooom, boooom—the hammer blows were really close now; the ground under their feet was shaking. Then suddenly there was silence. Andrei glanced outside again. And he saw it: a dark figure standing at the nearest intersection, with its head towering up to third-floor level. A statue. An archaic metal statue. The same character he already knew, with the toadish face—only now he was standing there rigidly erect, with his heavy chin uplifted and one hand held behind his back, while the other was raised, with the index finger extended, either to threaten or to point to the sky . . .
Numb with fear, Andrei watched this monster as if he were having a bad dream. But he knew it was no nightmare. It was just a statue—an idiotic, mediocre contrivance of metal, covered in calx, or maybe ferriferous oxide, positioned grotesquely out of place. In the hot air rising from the road surface, its outlines trembled and wavered exactly like the outlines of the buildings along the street.
Andrei felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around—the Mute was smiling and nodding reassuringly at him. The boooom, boooom, boooom started up again outside. The Mute kept hold of his shoulder—fondling and caressing, kneading the muscles with affectionate fingers. Andrei pulled away sharply and glanced out again. The statue was gone. And once again there was silence.
Then Andrei pushed the Mute aside and ran up the stairs on numb legs, to where the voices were still droning in the same way, as if nothing at all had happened.
“That’s enough!” he barked as he tore into the library hall. “Let’s get out of here!”
His voice had turned completely hoarse, and they didn’t hear him, or maybe they heard him but took no notice because they were too absorbed. It was a huge space, receding into an unbelievable distance, and the shelves stacked with books muffled all sounds. One set of shelves had been knocked over and the books from it were lying in a heap. Izya and Pak were rummaging in this heap—both of them flushed and sweaty, excited and delighted . . . Andrei walked across to them, striding straight over the books, grabbed them both by the collar, and jerked them up onto their feet.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said. “That’s enough. Let’s go.”
Izya cast a bleary glance at him, jerked himself free, and immediately came to his senses. He ran a rapid glance over Andrei from head to foot.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Has something happened?”
“Nothing’s happened,” Andrei said angrily. “That’s enough digging around in here. Where did you want to go? The Pantheon? So let’s go to the Pantheon.”
Pak, whom Andrei was still clutching by the collar, delicately wriggled his shoulders and cleared his throat. Andrei let go of him.
“Do you know what we found here?” Izya began excitedly, then suddenly broke off. “Listen, what has happened?”
Andrei had already pulled himself together. Everything that occurred down below seemed absolutely ludicrous and impossible up here—in this austere, airless hall, under Izya’s searching gaze, and in the presence of the imperturbably correct Pak.
“We can’t waste so much time on every site,” he said with a frown. “We’ve only got one day. Let’s go.”
“A library isn’t just any other site!” Izya immediately objected. “This is the first library on our entire route . . . Listen, you look terrible. Come on, what really has happened?”
Andrei still couldn’t bring himself to tell them. He didn’t know how. “Let’s go,” he growled, turning away and striding back across the books toward the way out.
Izya overhauled him, took him by the arm, and walked along beside him. The Mute in the doorway stepped aside to let them pass. Andrei still didn’t know how to begin. All the possible beginnings and all the possible
words were idiotic. Then he remembered about the diary.
“You were reading me a diary yesterday . . .” he said as they walked down the stairs. “You know, written by that guy who hanged himself . . .”
“Yes?”
“Yes, yes . . .”
Izya stopped. “The shimmering?”
“Did you really not hear anything?” Andrei asked despairingly.
Izya shook his beard from side to side, and Pak replied in a quiet voice. “We probably got carried away. We were arguing.”
“You maniacs . . .” said Andrei. He convulsively caught his breath, glanced around at the Mute, and finally said it. “The statue. It came and went . . . It seems they wander around the City, like they were alive . . .”
He lapsed into silence. “Well?” Izya asked impatiently.
“Well what? That’s it.”
Izya’s expression of intent interest changed to immense disappointment. “Well, so what?” he said. “So it’s a statue . . . another one walked last night, so what?”
Andrei opened his mouth and closed it again.
“The Ironheads,” Pak put in. “This is obviously where the legend came from.”
Unable to utter a word, Andrei glanced from Izya to Pak and back again. Izya rounded his lips in an sympathetic expression—the penny had finally dropped—and kept trying to pat Andrei on the arm, but Pak clearly didn’t think any further explanations were needed and furtively glanced back over his shoulder into the library.
“W-Well now . . .” Andrei finally managed to force out. “That’s just great. So you believed it straight off ?”
“Listen, calm down, will you,” said Izya, grabbing hold of his sleeve. “Of course we believed it, why wouldn’t we? The Experiment is the Experiment, isn’t it? We lost sight of that, thanks to rampant diarrhea and our constant bickering, but the fact of the matter . . . Lord Almighty, what’s the big deal? So they’re statues, so they walk . . . But we’ve got a library here! And you know what a fascinating picture it paints? The people who lived here were our contemporaries—from the twentieth century . . .”
“I get it,” said Andrei. “Let go of my sleeve.”
It was obvious to him now that he’d made a total fool of himself. But then, these two still haven’t seen the statue for real. I reckon they’ll change their tune when they do. But then, the Mute acted kind of strange too . . . “Don’t even try to persuade me,” he said. “We haven’t got time for this library right now. When we drive by with the tractors, you can load up an entire sledful. But right now we’re leaving. I promised to get back in time for taps.”
“All right, then,” Izya said soothingly. “Right, let’s go. Let’s go.”
Shit, Andrei thought uneasily as he hurried down the stairs. How could I act that way? he asked himself as he opened the entrance door and walked out into the street first, so no one could see his face. And I’m not some common soldier or crude, ignorant driver, he thought, striding over the sizzling-hot cobblestones. It’s all down to Fritz, he thought furiously. He proclaimed that there was no Experiment anymore, and I believed it . . . that is, I didn’t really believe it, of course, I just accepted the new ideology—out of a sense of loyalty and sworn duty . . . Ah, no, guys, all these new ideologies are for fools, for the masses . . . But we lived for four years and never even spared a thought for the Experiment, didn’t we; we were up to our eyes in other business . . . Making our little career . . . he thought scathingly. Acquiring carpets and items for our private collections . . .
At the intersection he slowed down for a moment and cast an oblique glance into the side street. The statue was there, gesturing menacingly with a finger fifty centimeters long, repulsively grinning with its toadish mouth. As if to say, I’ll get you, you sons of bitches!
“Is this the one?” Izya casually asked.
Andrei nodded and moved on.
They walked on and on, gradually sinking into a stupor in the heat and the blinding light, stepping on their own short, ugly shadows, with the sweat drying into a salty crust on their foreheads and temples, and even Izya had stopped yakking about how some elegant hypotheses he had constructed had been demolished, and even the tireless Pak was already dragging one foot—the sole of his boot had torn off—and from time to time even the Mute opened his black, gaping mouth, stuck out his gruesome stump of his tongue, and started panting in double-quick time, like a dog . . . And nothing else happened, except that once Andrei lost his grip and shuddered when he happened to look up and saw a huge, green-stained face in a wide-open window on the fourth floor, staring at him with blind, bulging eyes. Well, after all, it was a ghastly sight—an ugly face with green blotches, filling the entire window up on the fourth floor.
Then they walked out into the square.
They hadn’t come across any squares like this before. It looked like some weird kind of forest had been felled here. The square was studded all over with plinths—round, square, hexagonal, stelliform, shaped like weird abstract hedgehogs, artillery towers, and mythical beasts, made of stone, cast iron, sandstone, marble, stainless steel, and even, apparently, gold . . . And all these plinths were empty, except for one fifty meters ahead of them, on which a leg as tall as a man, with an exceptionally muscly calf, had been snapped off above the knee, leaving the naked foot trampling the head of a winged lion.
The square was huge—they couldn’t see the far side of it through the murky heat haze—but on the right, at the very foot of the Yellow Wall, they could make out the form of a long, low building with a facade of closely spaced columns, distorted by the currents of hot air.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Andrei blurted out.
But Izya quoted something that Andrei didn’t recognize: “Sometimes he is bronze, and sometimes he is marble, sometimes he has a pipe, and sometimes he has no pipe . . .” and then he asked, “But where have they all gone to?”
No one answered. They all just gazed at this sight, as if they couldn’t get enough of it—even the Mute. Then Pak said, “Apparently we need to go over there . . .”
“Is that your Pantheon?” Andrei asked, for the sake of saying something, and Izya exclaimed in an indignant-sounding voice, “I don’t understand! What are they all doing, gadding about town? Then why didn’t we see then? There must be thousands of them here, thousands!”
“The City of a Thousand Statues,” said Pak.
Izya promptly swung around to face him. “You mean there’s a legend about that too?”
“No. But that’s what I would call it.”
“Hallelujah!” Andrei declared, struck by a sudden thought. “How are we going to get through here with our sleds? No explosives could possibly clear all these tank traps . . .”
“I think there must be a road around the square,” said Pak. “Along the Cliff.”
“Let’s go, shall we?” said Izya, already impatient to move on.
They set off directly toward the Pantheon, walking between the podia, over cobblestones that were smashed and crushed to small fragments, walking into the white dust that glittered brightly in the sunlight. Every now and then they stopped for a moment and either bent down or went up on tiptoe to read the inscriptions on the pediments, and the strangeness of the inscriptions was startling and confusing.
ON THE NINTH DAY A SMILE MAKES. THE BLESSING OF YOUR MUSCULUS GLUTEUS SAVED THESE LITTLE ONES. THE SUN SOARED UP AND THE DAWN OF LOVE WAS EXTINGUISHED. Or even simply, WHEN! Izya laughed and gurgled, slamming his fist into his palm. Pak smiled and swayed his head, but Andrei was embarrassed; he felt that this merriment was inappropriate, even indecent somehow, but his feelings were hard to pin down, and he just patiently tried to hurry them along. “Come on, that’s enough, that’s enough,” he repeated. “Let’s go. Come on, what the hell! We’re running late, it’ll be embarrassing . . .”
The sight of these idiots made him furious—what a time and place to choose to have fun and games! And they just kept on loitering and loitering, tediously wasting time, runnin
g their dirty fingers over the incised letters, cackling and clowning around, and he gave up on them and felt nothing but tremendous relief when he realized their voices had been left far behind and he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
It’s better like this, he thought delightedly. Without this retinue of fools. After all, they weren’t invited along, were they—I don’t remember that. They were mentioned, all right, but exactly what was it that was said? They were either asked to come in dress uniform, or on the contrary, they were asked not to come at all. Agh, what difference does it make now? Well, if it comes to that, they can wait down here for a while. Pak’s more or less OK, but Izya might suddenly start finding fault with my style and then, God forbid, he’ll get pushy and want to speak himself . . . No, no, it’s better without them, really. And the Mute? You stick behind me, here on the right, and keep your eyes peeled! You definitely can’t afford to daydream here. Don’t forget: we’re in the camp of serious adversaries here, nothing like Quejada or Hnoipek. Here, brother, take the automatic, I’ve got to have freedom of movement, and climbing up on the rostrum with an automatic—I’m not Heiger, thank God . . . And pardon me, but where’s my synopsis? A fine how d’you do this is! How can I manage without a synopsis?
The Pantheon towered up over him, a panoply of columns and broken, chipped steps, displaying their rusty reinforcing rods. He felt a cold draft from the columns—it was dark in there, where it smelled of anticipation and putrefaction, and the gigantic golden doors had already been flung open, and all he had to do was walk in. He strode from step to step, taking great care to make sure that he didn’t stumble—heaven forbid!—and end up sprawled out here, where everyone could see, and he kept groping at his pockets, but of course the synopsis wasn’t there, because of course, it had been left behind in the metal box . . . no, in the new suit, I was going to wear the new suit, wasn’t I, then I decided this would make a more dramatic impact . . .
Damn it all, how am I going to manage without a synopsis? he thought as he stepped into the dark vestibule. But just what did it say in the synopsis? he thought, cautiously placing his feet as he walked across a slippery floor of black marble. Greatness came first, he recalled with an intense effort, feeling the icy cold creeping in under his shirt. It was very cold in here, in this vestibule, they could have warned him, after all, it was summer outside, and by the way, they could have sprinkled some sand around, it wouldn’t have killed them, this way he could slip at any moment and smash in the back of his head.