“Well, then let’s just shoot ourselves and to hell with it,” said Andrei. He already knew he wasn’t going to shoot himself. He wanted to live. He’d never realized before how much he could want to live.
“Ah, come on,” said Izya. “But seriously?”
“Seriously, I want to live. And I will survive. I don’t give a rotten damn for anything now. It’s just the two of us now, got it? The two of us have got to survive, and that’s all. And they can all damn well go to hell. We’ll just find water and live beside it.”
“That’s right,” said Izya. He sat up on the bed, pushed his hand under his shirt, and started scratching. “We’ll spend the day drinking water, and I’ll spend the night screwing you.”
Andrei looked at him, bewildered. “Have you got any other suggestions?” he asked.
“Not yet. That’s right—we have to find water. Without water we’re done for. Then we’ll see what comes after that. What I’m thinking right now is this: they obviously took off out of here in a big hurry, straight after the bloodbath. They were afraid. They climbed into the sled and stepped on the gas! We ought to ferret around in the house a bit—we’re bound to find water and food here . . .” He was about to say something else, but he stopped with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging. “Look, look!” he said in a frightened whisper.
Andrei rapidly swung around to face the window. He didn’t notice anything unusual at first; he only heard something—a kind of distant rumbling, like a landslide, as if rocks were showering down somewhere . . . Then his eyes spotted movement on the vertical yellow cliff face above the roofs.
From out of the bluish-whitish haze up high above, a strange triangular cloud was hurtling downward, with its pointed angle first. It was moving down from an unbelievable height, and was still a very long way from the foot of the Wall, but he could already make out a bulky form with painfully familiar outlines spinning furiously at the leading point, crashing into invisible projections and bouncing off them. At every blow, parts flew off the hulk and carried on falling beside it. Crushed rock hurtled down, fanning out as it fell, puffs of bright dust swirled up, and they drew together to form a cloud that widened out farther and farther, like the wake behind the stern of a speedboat, and the distant, rumbling roar grew louder, breaking up into separate blows, a drumroll of fragments crashing against the monolithic Cliff, the menacing rustling of a gigantic landslide . . .
“The tractor!” Izya exclaimed in a strangled voice.
Andrei only understood what Izya had said at the last moment, when the mangled and twisted vehicle smashed into the roofs, the floor under his feet shuddered from the appalling impact, a column of brick dust swirled upward, and fragments of stone and metal sheeting were sent flying through the air—an instant later all this was hidden under the tidal wave of the yellow avalanche.
For a long time they sat there without speaking, listening as the rumbling, crunching, and snapping tumbled on, and the floor under their feet kept shaking, and they couldn’t see anything over the roofs any longer through the motionless yellow cloud.
“Holy shit!” said Izya. “How the hell did they get up there?”
“Who?” Andrei asked obtusely.
“That’s our tractor, you blockhead!”
“What do you mean, our tractor? The one that took off ?”
Izya massaged his nose as vigorously as he could with his dirty fingers before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t understand a thing. . . Do you understand it?” he suddenly asked, turning to the Mute. “I don’t understand a thing.”
The Mute nodded indifferently. Izya slammed his fist down on his knees in annoyance, but just then the Mute made a strange gesture: he stretched his index finger out in front of him, rapidly lowered it to the floor, then lifted it up over his head, tracing out an elongated circle in the air.
“Well?” Izya asked avidly. “Well?”
The Mute shrugged and repeated the same gesture. Andrei suddenly remembered something, and when he remembered, he immediately understood everything.
“Falling Stars!” he exclaimed. “Well, would you believe it!” he laughed bitterly. “And I’ve only understood it now!”
“What have you understood?” Izya yelled. “What stars?”
Still laughing, Andrei just waved his hand. “Forget it,” he said. “Forget it, the whole damned thing! What does it matter to us now? No more blathering, Katzman! We have to survive, got that? Survive! In this abominable, impossible world! We need water, Katzman!”
“Hang on, hang on . . .” Izya muttered.
“There’s nothing else I want!” Andrei roared, shaking his clenched fists. “I don’t want to understand anything anymore! I don’t want to find out anything! Those are dead bodies lying out there, Katzman! Dead bodies! They wanted to live too, didn’t they, Katzman? And now they’re bloated and they’re rotting!”
Thrusting out his beard, Izya got up off the bed, grabbed hold of Andrei’s jacket, and forced him to sit down on the floor.
“Shut up!” he said with terrible wheezing hiss. “Want me to smack you in the face right now? I will. You whining old woman!”
Andrei grated his teeth and said nothing.
Puffing and panting, Izya went back to his bed and started scratching again. “He’s never seen dead bodies before . . .” he growled. “Never seen this world before. Stop griping, you wimp!”
Burying his face in his hands, Andrei fought to trample down and crush the senseless, hideous wailing inside him. But some small corner of his mind understood what was happening to him, and that helped. It was terrifying to be here, surrounded by dead men, supposedly still alive yourself but actually already dead too . . . Izya was saying something, but Andrei couldn’t hear it. Then it passed. “What were you saying?” he asked, taking his hands away from his face.
“I was saying that I’ll go and ferret around in the soldiers’ quarters, and you ferret around in the intelligentsia’s room. And don’t forget Quejada’s room—he must have kept some kind of geologists’ emergency supplies in there somewhere. And don’t panic, we’ll pull through this.”
At that moment the sun went out.
“Damnation! The worst possible moment!” said Izya. “Now we have to look for a lamp . . . Hang on, your lamp ought to be here somewhere, right?”
“Our watches,” Andrei said with an effort. “We have to set our watches . . .”
He raised his wrist to his eyes, focused on the phosphorescent hands, and set them to 1200 hours. Izya was scrabbling around in the darkness, swearing through his teeth, moving his bed around for some reason, and rustling papers. Then a match scraped and lit. Izya stood on his knees in the middle of the room, waving the match from side to side.
“Don’t just sit there, damn you,” he yelled. “Look for the lamp! Move it, I’ve only got three matches!”
Andrei got up reluctantly, but the Mute had already found the lamp, raised the glass, and handed it to Izya. The room got brighter. Izya wiggled his beard intently as he tried to adjust the burner. But he fumbled too clumsily and the burner refused to be adjusted. The Mute, gleaming all over with sweat, went back into the corner, squatted down on his haunches, and stared out at Andrei from there with plaintive devotion, his eyes wide open like a child’s. The troops. The rump of a routed army . . .
“Let me have the lamp,” said Andrei.
He took the lamp from Izya and adjusted the burner.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
He pushed open the door of the colonel’s room. The windows here were firmly closed and the glass in them was unbroken, so he couldn’t smell the stench at all. The air smelled of tobacco and eau de cologne. Of the colonel.
Everything was neat and tidy: the high-quality leather of two packed suitcases glimmered in the lamplight; the folding camp bed was made up without a single wrinkle. At the head of the bed a shoulder belt with a holster and military cap with an immense visor hung on a nail. A gas lantern stood on a circle
of felt on a bulky chest of drawers in the corner, with a box of matches, a pile of books, and a pair of binoculars in a case lying beside it.
Andrei put down his lamp on the table and looked around again. The tray with the flask and inverted shot glasses was standing on one shelf of an empty bookcase.
“Hand me that,” Andrei said to the Mute.
The Mute darted across, grabbed the tray, and set it on the table, beside the lamp. Andrei poured cognac into the shot glasses. There were only two of them, so he filled the cap of the flask for himself.
“Take it,” he said. “Here’s to life.”
Izya gave him an approving look, took a shot glass, and sniffed at it with the air of a connoisseur.
“That’s good stuff! Here’s to life, you say? Is this really life?” He giggled, clinked glasses with the Mute, and drained his glass. His eyes turned moist. “Goo-ood,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.
The Mute drained his glass, too—as if it were water, without the slightest interest. But Andrei carried on standing there, holding the full flask-cap, in no hurry to down his drink. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t really know what it was. Yet another major stage was ending and a new one was beginning. And although he couldn’t possibly expect anything good from tomorrow, at least tomorrow was a reality—an exceptionally tangible reality, because it could well be one of a very, very small number of days still remaining. This was a feeling entirely new to Andrei, a very poignant feeling.
But he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he just repeated the same words—“Here’s to life!”—and drank.
Then he lit the colonel’s gas lantern and handed it to Izya, with a promise: “You smash that one, you cack-handed hairy ape, and I’ll box your ears for you.”
Izya left, muttering resentfully, but Andrei lingered on, absentmindedly glancing around the room. Of course, he ought to ferret around in here—Duggan must have kept some kind of stash for the colonel—but the idea of ferreting around in this place somehow felt . . . shameful, was that it?
“Don’t be shy, Andrei, don’t be shy,” he suddenly heard a familiar voice say. “The dead don’t need anything.”
The Mute was sitting on the edge of the table, dangling his legs, and he wasn’t the Mute any longer—or, rather, not entirely the Mute. He was still wearing only his trousers, with the machete on the broad belt, but now his skin was dry, a matte ivory color, his face had rounded out, and his cheeks had acquired a healthy bloom, like two peaches. It was the Mentor, as large as life—and the sight of him brought Andrei neither joy nor hope; it didn’t lift his spirits. He felt annoyed and uneasy.
“You again . . .” he growled, turning his back to the Mentor. “Long time no see.”
He walked over to the window, pressed his forehead against the warm glass, and started looking out into the darkness that was faintly illuminated by little flames on the still-smoldering sled. “Well, as you can see, we’re all set to die here . . .”
“Why die?” the Mentor said cheerfully. “You have to live! You know, it’s never too late and always too early to die, isn’t that right?”
“And what if we don’t find water?”
“You’ll find it. You always have and you will now.”
“Good. We’ll find it. Do we live beside it for the rest of our lives? Then what’s the point of living?”
“What’s the point of living anyway?”
“That’s what I keep thinking too: what’s the point of living? I’ve lived a stupid life, Mentor. An idiotic kind of life. Bobbing about aimlessly like a turd that won’t flush. At first I fought for some kind of ideas, then for rugs that were in short supply, and then I totally flipped . . . and I destroyed those men.”
“Come on, come on, you’re not being serious,” said the Mentor. “People always end up dead. You’re not to blame for that, are you? You’re starting a new stage, Andrei, and, in my opinion, a decisive one. In a certain sense it’s actually good that things have turned out exactly this way. Sooner or later all this would inevitably have happened anyway. The expedition was doomed, wasn’t it? But you could have perished with it, without ever crossing this important borderline . . .”
“I wonder exactly what borderline that is,” Andrei said with a chuckle. He turned to face the Mentor. “I’ve already had ideas—all sorts of hooey about the good of society and other mumbo jumbo for kids still wet behind the ears . . . I’ve already made a career, thanks—I’ve had enough of being a big boss . . . So what else is there that can happen to me?”
“Understanding!” said the Mentor, slightly raising his voice.
“What—understanding? Understanding of what?”
“Understanding,” the Mentor repeated. “That’s what you’ve never had before—understanding!”
“I’ve got this understanding of yours right up to here now!” said Andrei, tapping the edge of his open hand against his Adam’s apple. “I understand everything in the world now. It took thirty years to reach this understanding, and now I’ve got there at last. Nobody needs me, and nobody needs anyone. Whether I exist or I don’t, whether I fight the fight or kick back and lounge on the sofa—it makes no difference. Nothing can be changed, nothing can be put right. All I can do is find myself a more or less comfortable niche. Everything moves along on its own; I don’t make any difference. There it is, that’s your understanding—and there’s nothing else left for me to understand. But you tell me what I’m supposed to do with this understanding! Pickle it for winter or eat it right now?”
The Mentor nodded. “Precisely,” he said. “That is the final borderline: What do you do with your understanding? How do you live with it? You have to live anyway, don’t you?”
“The right time to live is when you don’t have any understanding!” Andrei said with quiet fury. “With this understanding the right thing to do is die! And if I weren’t such a coward, if the damned protoplasm didn’t scream so loud inside me, I’d know what to do. I’d choose a good, strong rope . . .”
He stopped speaking.
The Mentor took the flask, carefully filled one shot glass, then the other, and pensively screwed the cap back on. “Well, let’s start from the fact that you’re not a coward,” he said. “And the reason you haven’t used that rope has nothing to do with you being afraid . . . Somewhere in your subconscious, and not so very deep, I assure you, lies the conviction that it is possible to live, even with understanding. And live pretty well. Interesting, that.” He started pushing one of the shot glasses over to Andrei with his fingernail. “Remember how your father tried to force you to read The War of the Worlds, and you didn’t want to? How furious you were—you stuck that cursed book under the sofa so you could get back to your illustrated Baron Munchausen . . . Wells bored you, he made you feel sick, you didn’t understand why the hell you had to read him, you didn’t want to know about him . . . But later you read that book twelve times, until you knew it by heart, you drew illustrations for it, and you even tried to write a sequel.”
“So what?” Andrei said morosely.
“And that kind of thing happened to you time and again!” said the Mentor. “And it will happen again, more than once. You’ve just had understanding hammered into you, and it makes you feel sick, you don’t understand what the hell you need it for, you don’t want to know about it . . .” He picked up his shot glass. “Here’s to the sequel!” he said.
Andrei stepped up to the table, and he took his shot glass, and he raised it to his lips, feeling the usual sense of relief as all his dismal doubts were dispersed yet again, and a new glimmer of light appeared somewhere up ahead in the darkness that had seemed impenetrable, and now he was supposed to drink up, and briskly slam the empty glass down onto the table, and say something bright and cheerful, and spring into action, but just at that moment some third character, who previously had always remained silent—he must have been sleeping, or lying around drunk, or he simply couldn’t give a damn—suddenly snickered and babbled, “Doo
de doo de doo de doo!”
Andrei splashed the cognac onto the floor, put the shot glass down on the tray, stuck his hands in his pockets, and said, “But there’s something I still don’t understand, Mentor . . . Drink, drink, enjoy it, I’m not in the mood.” He couldn’t look at that ruddy face anymore. He turned away and went over to the window again. “You’re too much of a yes-man, Mr. Mentor. You’re Voronin number two, my yellow, rubbery conscience, a used condom . . . Everything’s fine with you, Voronin, everything’s just great, my dear friend. The important thing is that we’re safe and sound, and all the others can go croak. If there isn’t enough food, I’ll just shoot Katzman, eh? All fine and dandy!”
The door creaked behind him. He looked around. The room was empty. And the shot glasses were empty, and the flask was empty, and his chest felt empty, as if something large that was always there had been cut out of it. Maybe a tumor. Maybe his heart . . .
Already growing accustomed to this new sensation, Andrei walked over to the colonel’s bed, took the belt down off the nail, girded it on real good and tight, and shifted the holster around onto his stomach.
“A keepsake,” he told the snow-white pillow in a loud voice.
PART VI
The sun was at its zenith. Its disk, copper colored through the dust, hung at the center of a dirty white sky, and his misshapen shadow writhed and bristled right under the soles of his shoes, sometimes gray and blurred, sometimes suddenly seeming to come alive, acquiring sharply defined outlines and flooding with blackness—and then it was especially ugly. There wasn’t even a hint of any road here—there was bumpy, yellow-gray clay, cracked and dead, as hard as stone, so naked it was quite impossible to understand how there could be so much dust everywhere.
The wind, thank God, was blowing at his back. Somewhere far behind him it had sucked up countless tons of this abominable, incandescent powder and was dragging it with obtuse stubbornness along this sunbaked ledge squeezed in between the Abyss and the Yellow Wall, sometimes flinging it in swirling protuberances right up to the sky, sometimes spinning it into lithe, flirtatious, swan-necked dust devils, or sometimes simply tumbling it along in a billowing wave, and then, suddenly enraged, it would fling this fine, prickly flour against his back and into his hair, hurling it furiously at the sweat-soaked nape of his neck, lashing his hands and ears with it, filling his pockets with it, pouring it in behind his collar . . .