“Good!” Izya said with a croak. “Only not enough. Eh?”
Andrei nodded. The water he had drunk immediately emerged as sweat, and everything in his mouth remained the same as it had been, without even the slightest feeling of relief. He lifted up the canister, figuring something out. There’d probably be enough for a couple of days, and then . . . And then something else will turn up, he told himself fiercely. The Experiment is the Experiment. They won’t let you live, but they won’t let you croak either . . . He cast a glance at the white plateau that stretched out ahead of them, radiating heat, bit on his dry lip, and started setting the canister back in the cart. Izya had squatted down and was binding up the sole of his shoe again.
“You know,” Izya panted, “this really is a strange kind of place. Actually I can’t recall anything like it at all.” He glanced at the sun, shading his eyes with his hand. “At the zenith,” he said. “I swear to God, at the zenith. Something’s going to happen . . . Oh, dump that damned lump of iron, will you, what are you fumbling with that for?”
Andrei carefully arranged the automatic beside the canister. “Without that lump of iron the two of us would have left our bones behind the Pavilion,” he reminded Izya.
“That was behind the Pavilion!” Izya retorted. “Since then we’ve been walking for more than four weeks and we haven’t even seen a fly.”
“All right,” said Andrei. “You don’t have to carry it . . . Let’s go.”
The stone plateau turned out to be amazingly smooth. The carts rolled over it as if it were asphalt, with the wheels squeaking. But the heat became even more terrible. The white stone flung the sun’s rays back up, and now there was no escape for their eyes. Their feet burned as if they weren’t wearing any shoes at all, and strangely enough, there was as much dust as ever. If we don’t snuff it here, Andrei thought, then we’ll live forever. He walked with his eyes screwed almost closed, and then closed them completely. That made it a bit easier. This is the way I’m going to walk, he thought. And I’ll open my eyes, let’s say, every twenty steps. Or thirty . . . Take a quick look and move on . . .
The basement of the Tower had been floored with very similar white stone. Only there it had been cool and dark, and there were lots of thick cardboard boxes standing along the walls, mysteriously full of various hardware items. There were nails, screws, bolts of every possible size, cans of different kinds of glue and paint, bottles of different-colored varnishes, carpentry and machine-work tools, ball bearings wrapped in oilpaper . . . They hadn’t found anything edible, but in the corner a short, rusty pipe protruded from the wall, with a thin trickle of cold, incredibly delicious water flowing out of it and disappearing under the ground . . .
“Everything in your system is good,” Andrei had said, setting his mug under the trickle for the twentieth time. “There’s just one thing I don’t like. I don’t like it when people are divided into the important and the unimportant. It’s not right. It’s abhorrent. There’s the temple, and there’s the inane rabble swarming around it. ‘Man is a poor soul, burdened with a corpse.’ Even if that really is true, it’s still not right. The whole damn system should be changed.”
“And am I saying it shouldn’t?” said Izya. “Of course it would be a good thing to change that order of things. Only how? So far all attempts to change the situation and level out the human playing field and set everyone on the same level, in order to make everything right and just—all these attempts have ended in the demolition of the temple so that it wouldn’t tower over everyone, and the severing of any heads that jutted up above the general level. And that’s all. And then the foul-smelling pyramid of the new political elite started growing over the leveled field, expanding as rapidly as a cancerous tumor, even more repulsive than the old one. And so far, you know, no other ways have been invented. Of course, all these excesses haven’t altered the course of history and they haven’t been able to completely destroy the temple, but plenty of brilliant heads have been chopped off.”
“I know,” said Andrei. “But even so. Even so, it’s vile. Any elite is odious.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” Izya exclaimed. “Now, if you said, ‘Any elite that controls the lives and fates of other people is odious,’ then I’d agree with you. But an elite in itself, an elite for itself—who does that interfere with? It irritates people; it makes them furious, it drives them wild!—that’s a different matter, but then, after all, irritating people is one of its functions . . . And complete equality is a stagnant swamp. We should thank old Mother Nature that such a thing as complete equality is impossible . . . Don’t get me wrong, Andrei, I’m not proposing a system for rearranging the world. I don’t know any system like that, and I don’t believe it exists. Too many different kinds of systems have been tried, and basically everything has remained the way it was . . . All I’m offering you is a goal for existence . . . dammit, I’m not even offering it, you’ve confused me. I’ve discovered this goal in myself and for myself—the goal of my existence, do you understand me? Of my existence and the existence of others like me . . . After all, I’m only talking to you about it and talking to you at this time because I felt sorry for you—I can see a man who is ready, who has burned everything that he used to worship, and now he doesn’t know what to worship. And you can’t live without worshipping; you imbibed that with your mother’s milk: the need to worship something or someone. They beat it into your head once and for all that if there’s no idea that’s worth dying for, then it’s not even worth living. And people like you, who’ve reached a final understanding, are capable of terrible things. A man can blow his brains out, or turn into a supernatural villain—a convinced villain, a principled, disinterested villain, do you understand? Or else even worse: he’ll start taking revenge on the world because the world is the way it really is, and doesn’t conform to some predetermined ideal or other. And another good thing about the idea of the temple, by the way, is that dying for it is positively counterindicated. You have to live for it. Live every day, with all your strength, at full throttle.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Andrei. “Probably that’s the way it all is. But even so, this idea still isn’t mine!”
Andrei stopped and took a tight grip on Izya’s sleeve. Izya immediately opened his eyes and asked in a frightened voice, “What? What is it?”
“Shut up,” Andrei said through his teeth.
There was something up ahead of them. Something was moving, not spinning around in a column, not trailing about just above the stone, but moving through all of that. Toward them.
“People,” Izya said delightedly. “Listen, Andriukha, people!”
“Quiet, you jerk,” Andrei said in a whisper.
He’d already realized that they were people. Or one person . . . No, it looked like two. Standing there. They’d probably noticed him and Izya too . . . Now he couldn’t see a damned thing through the cursed dust again.
“There, you see!” Izya said in a triumphant whisper. “And you kept moaning: we’re going to croak . . .”
Andrei cautiously took off his harness and backed toward his cart, keeping his eyes fixed on the indecipherable shadows ahead of them. Dammit, how many of them are there, after all? And how far is it to them from here? About a hundred meters, maybe? Or less? He found the automatic in the cart by touch, slid back the bolt, and said to Izya, “Move the carts together, lie down behind them. You can cover me if anything . . .”
He stuck the automatic in Izya’s hands and slowly set off forward, without looking back, holding his hand on his holster. The visibility was abominable. He’ll shoot me he thought, meaning Izya. Plant a bullet right in the back of my head . . .
Now he could make out that one of the others was also walking toward him—an indeterminate, lanky silhouette in the swirling dust. Does he have a gun or not? Here’s the Anticity for you. Who could ever have thought it? Oh, I don’t like the way he’s holding his hand! Andrei cautiously unbuttoned his holster and took hold of the ribbed handl
e. His thumb automatically set itself on the safety catch. It’s OK, everything will work out fine. It has to. The main thing is not to make any abrupt movements.
He pulled the pistol out of the holster. The pistol got caught on something. Suddenly he felt afraid. He tugged harder, then even harder, and then with all his strength. He clearly saw an abrupt movement by the man who was walking toward him (tall, tattered, exhausted, with a dirty beard right up to his eyes) . . . It’s stupid, he thought, squeezing the trigger. There was a shot, there was the flash of a return shot, he thought there was a shout from Izya . . . and there was a blow to his chest that instantly extinguished the sun.
“Well now, Andrei,” the Mentor’s voice said with a note of solemnity. “You have passed through the first circle.”
The bulb under the green glass shade was lit, and in the circle of light a fresh copy of Leningrad Pravda was lying on the desk, with a large leading article entitled “The Love of Leningraders for Comrade Stalin Is Boundless.” A radio was buzzing and muttering on a set of shelves behind him. Mom was rattling dishes in the kitchen and talking to the woman who shared the apartment. There was a smell of fried fish. In the enclosed yard outside the window little kids were squealing and kicking up a racket in a game of hide-and-go-seek. The damp autumn air came in through the small transom at the top of the window, which was wide open. Only a minute ago, all this had been completely different from the way it was now—far more ordinary and familiar. It had been without a future. Or rather, separate from the future.
Andrei aimlessly smoothed out the newspaper before he spoke. “The first? Why the first?”
“Because there are many more still to come,” the Mentor’s voice said.
Then Andrei got up, trying not to look in the direction the voice came from, and leaned his shoulder against the cupboard by the window. The black well shaft of the yard, weakly illuminated by the yellow rectangles of the windows, was below him and above him, and somewhere far above, in a sky that had already turned dark, Vega was shining. It was absolutely impossible to leave all this again and absolutely—even more!—impossible to stay here among all this. Now. After everything.
“Izya! Izya!” a woman’s voice called stridently in the yard. “Izya, come home for supper already! Children, have you seen Izya?”
And the children’s voices down below started shouting, “Izka! Katzman! Go on, your mom’s calling you.”
Tense in every muscle, Andrei stuck his face right up against the glass, peering into the darkness. But all he could see were indecipherable shadows darting between the banked-up stacks of wood on the wet, black bottom of the shaft.
AFTERWORD
BY BORIS STRUGATSKY
The idea for The Doomed City first came to us in March 1967, when the work on Tale of the Troika was going full steam ahead. It was at the Artists’ and Writers’ House in Golitsyno—in the evenings there we regularly took a stroll through the village before bed, lazily discussing our work, both current and forthcoming, and during one of these strolls we hit on a subject, which at the time we called The New Apocalypse. It is very difficult, probably even impossible at this stage, to reconstruct the image of the City that we painted for ourselves back then, in those bygone days. I suspect it was something drastically different from the final version of the world of the Experiment. Suffice it to say that another provisional title for the same novel turns up in our letters from the late 1960s: My Brother and I. Seemingly this novel was originally conceived as autobiographical to a significant degree.
We never worked so long and so painstakingly on any of our other works, either before or after. Three years was spent amassing, scrap by scrap, the episodes, the characters’ biographies, individual phrases and turns of speech; we invented the City, its peculiarities, and the laws governing its existence, as well as a cosmography, as authentic as we could possibly make it, for this artificial world, and its history. It was genuinely delightful and fascinating work, but everything in this world ends sometime, and in June 1969 we drew up the first detailed plan and adopted the definitive title—The Doomed City. This is the title of a famous painting by Roerich that had once astounded us with its somber beauty and the sense of hopelessness emanating from it.
The draft of the novel was completed in six sessions (in all, about seventy full working days) over a period of two and a quarter years. On May 27, 1972, we wrote in the final period, heaved a sigh of relief, and stuffed the unusually thick file into the bookcase. Into the archive. For a long time. Forever. It was perfectly obvious to us that the novel had absolutely no prospects.
I can’t really say we had cherished any serious hopes earlier either, when we were just beginning to work on it. Already in the late 1960s, and even more so in the early ’70s, it was clear that we would not be able to publish this novel. Very probably never, but certainly not during our lifetime. However, at the very beginning we still had a rather optimistic idea of how future events would develop. We imagined that after finishing the manuscript, we would type up a clean copy and tote it (with an air of absolute innocence) around to publishers. To lots of publishers. To lots of various different publishers. It would be rejected, naturally, at all these publishers, but first they would be certain to read it. And at each publisher’s office not just one person would read it but several, in the usual way. And they would make copies, in the usual way. And then give them to people whom they knew to read. And then the novel would start to exist. The same way as had happened more than once before—with The Snail on the Slope, and with Tale of the Troika, and with The Ugly Swans. It would be an illegal, silent, almost transparent existence, but existence nonetheless—interaction between the work of literature and the reader, the interaction without which there is no work of literature, and no literature in general.
But by mid-1972 this modest plan already looked impractical and even rather dangerous. The story of Vasily Grossman’s remarkable epic novel Life and Fate, the manuscript of which was sent directly from the offices of the literary journal Znamya of those days to the “organs,” where it sank without a trace (after all the searches and confiscations, only a single, solitary copy survived by a miracle; just a little longer and the novel would have completely ceased to exist, as if it had never even existed at all!)—we knew this story very well, and it served as a somber warning to us. In times like that it was absolutely unwise even to take the manuscript out of the house. Even giving it to people we knew had become dangerous. And the very best thing to do, of course, was to never even mention the book’s existence—to play it safe. And so we read the draft (out loud, in our home) only to our very closest friends, and for many years everyone else who took an interest remained convinced that “the Strugatskys are writing a new novel, they’ve been writing it for ages, but they just can’t pull themselves together and finish it.”
And after the summer of 1974, after the “Heifetz-Etkind case,” after the predatory gaze of the “competent authorities” stopped merely browsing through the general neighborhood and focused right in on one of the coauthors, the situation became even more threatening. A new Leningrad Case was clearly being put together in Petersburg, which meant that in theory they could come at any moment for anyone whose cover had been blown, and that would have meant (apart from everything else) the end of the novel, since it existed only as a single, solitary copy, and that was lying in the bookcase, “in plain sight,” so to speak. And so in late 1974 the manuscript was hastily typed out in three copies by this author (with an indispensable proofreading being carried out at the same time) and then two copies were delivered, with every possible precaution being observed, to reliable individuals—one Muscovite and one Leningrader. And in addition, these individuals were selected as being, on the one hand, absolutely and unimpeachably honest, above even the very slightest suspicion, and, on the other hand, not obviously numbered among our closest friends, so that if things took a turn for the worse, no one ought to come to them. Thank God, everything turned out well and nothing unt
oward happened, but those two copies lay there, in their “special archives,” until the end of the 1980s, when we finally managed to get City published.
And even then, the very first publication (in the Leningrad journal Neva) was no simple matter; it involved a number of neurotic compulsive maneuvers: the novel was divided into two books, and it was implied that the first book had been written a long time earlier, while the second had supposedly only just been completed. Somehow it was felt that this was important and helped (in some entirely incomprehensible manner) to pull the wool over the eyes of the Leningrad Regional Committee, which in those days no longer kept a tight stranglehold on publishers’ throats but was still clutching their coattails in its sharp claws. The “first” book was published in late 1988, and the “second” in early 1989, and entirely preposterous dates of composition were given at the end of the novel. The flames of perestroika were just taking hold; new times were beginning, filled with prodigious promise but still as uncertain, unstable, and insubstantial as the light of an icon lamp fluttering in the wind.
I strongly suspect that the present-day reader is entirely incapable of understanding, let alone re-creating in his imagination, all these fears and precautionary ruses. “What’s the problem?” he will ask in justified incomprehension. “What’s all this fuss and bother about? Just what’s so almighty shocking about this novel of yours, that you had to weave this high-tension, Frederick Forsyth–style political thriller around it?” I admit that it’s not easy for me to dispel misunderstandings of this kind. The times have changed so much, and so have ideas about what is admissible and what is not in literature.
For instance, in our novel Alexander Galich is cited (“They sent the prophet up the river a short while later . . .”) and naturally he is cited without any references, but in those days even a disguised allusion like this was absolutely unacceptable, in fact downright dangerous. It was a bomb planted under the editor, the editor-in-chief, the publishing house. Even from a distance, it’s terrifying to imagine what the authorities could have done to a publisher if a quotation like that slipped through into print.