Andrei looked at Fritz in bewilderment. With the air of a genuine battle commander, Heiger surveyed the field of imminent action through narrowed eyes. The driver shut off the engine, and the silence that ensued was filled with wild, absolutely nonurban sounds—roaring and mewing, a low, velvety whooping, burping, champing, grunting . . . At that moment the besieged woman started shrieking at the top of her voice, and Fritz went into action.
“Disembark!” he ordered. “Move it, move! Deploy in a line . . . Deploy in a line, I said, not a huddle! Forward! Beat them, drive them away! Don’t jab at them, beat them! I don’t want to see a single ugly brute left here! Beat them on the head and on the spine! Don’t poke at them, beat them! Forward, move it! Don’t stop, hey, you there!”
Andrei was one of the first to jump down. He didn’t deploy into a line; instead he took a more comfortable grip on his iron bludgeon and went dashing straight to the aid of the woman. Catching sight of him, the long-tailed hooligans burst into peals of diabolical laughter and darted off down the street, hopping and skipping and wiggling their gleaming buttocks derisively. The woman carried on screeching with her eyes squeezed tightly shut and her hands clenched into fists, but she wasn’t in danger anymore, and Andrei left her and set off toward the bandits who were ransacking the food stall.
They were powerful, seasoned veterans, especially one, with a tail as black as coal—he was sitting on a barrel, lowering his arm into it up to the shoulder, fishing out pickled cucumbers and champing on them with relish, every now and then spitting at his cronies, who were frantically ripping away the plywood wall of the stall. Noticing Andrei approaching, the black-tailed character stopped chewing and grinned balefully. Andrei didn’t like the look of that grin at all, but retreat was impossible. He swung back his iron pole, yelled “Beat it!” and dashed forward.
The black-tailed character grinned even more malignly—he had fangs like a sperm whale—then skipped down lazily off the barrel, moved a few paces away, and started biting at something under his armpit. “Beat it, you pest!” Andrei yelled even louder, and swung the metal bar against the barrel. Then the black-tailed character darted off to the side and leaped in a single bound onto a second-floor cornice. Emboldened by his adversary’s cowardice, Andrei darted over to the stall and smashed his iron pole against the wall. The wall split open and black-tail’s friends scattered in all directions. The battlefield had been cleared and Andrei looked around.
Fritz’s battle formations had disintegrated and the soldiers were wandering in confusion around the street, which was now empty, peering into entryways or stopping and throwing their heads back to look up at the baboons, who were spread out along the cornices on the facades of the buildings. In the distance the intellectual type was stomping along the street, whirling his pole above his head and raising clouds of dust as he pursued a lame monkey that was indolently trudging along just two paces ahead of him. There was no one to do battle with—even Fritz was at a loss. He stood there beside the truck, scowling and gnawing on his finger.
Quietening down again when they sensed that they were out of danger, the baboons went back to exchanging comments, scratching themselves, and making love. The most insolent of them moved lower, ranting unmistakable abuse, grimacing mockingly, and displaying their backsides insultingly. Andrei spotted black-tail again: he was already on the other side of the street, sitting on a lamppost and roaring with laughter. A small, swarthy-skinned man who looked like a Greek set off toward the lamppost with a menacing air. He took a swing and launched his iron pole up at black-tail with all his might. There was a clang and a clatter, broken glass came showering down, and black-tail jumped about a meter in the air in his surprise and almost fell, but adroitly grabbed hold with his tail, assumed his previous pose, and suddenly, arching his back, drenched the Greek with a stream of liquid fecal matter. Andrei felt the gorge rise in his throat, and he turned away. The defeat was absolute; it seemed impossible to come up with any kind of response.
Andrei walked over to Fritz and asked in a low voice, “Well, what are we going to do?”
“Fuck knows,” Fritz said rancorously. “If only we had a flamethrower . . .”
“Maybe we could bring some bricks?” asked a pimply young guy in overalls who had walked across to them. “I’m from the brick factory. We’ve got a truck; we could be there and back in half an hour.”
“No,” Fritz said categorically. “Bricks are no good. We’d break all the windows, and then they’d pelt us with our own bricks . . . No. What’s needed here is some kind of pyrotechnics . . . Rockets, detonators . . . Ah, if I just had a dozen cylinders of phosgene gas!”
“Where would we get detonators in the City?” a scornful bass voice asked. “And as for phosgene, I think I’d rather have baboons . . .”
They began crowding around their commander. Only the swarthy-skinned Greek stayed away—he was washing himself off at a hydrant, spewing out infernal curses.
Andrei watched out of the corner of his eye as black-tail and his friends sneakily sidled over to the food stall again. Here and there in the windows of the buildings local inhabitants’ faces, mostly women’s, began appearing, pale from the terrors they had suffered or red with annoyance. “Well, don’t just stand there!” they shouted angrily from the windows. “Send them packing, you men! Look, they’re looting the food stall! Why are you just standing there like stuffed dummies? Hey you, the white-haired one! Give an order, can’t you? Why are you just standing there like that? Good God, my children are crying! Do something so we can come out! Call yourselves men? Frightened of monkeys!” The men snarled sullenly and shamefacedly in reply.
“The fire brigade! We need to call the fire brigade!” insisted the scornful bass voice that preferred baboons to phosgene. “With ladders, and hoses . . .”
“Aw, come on, where would we find that many firemen?”
“The firemen are on Main Street.”
“Maybe we should light up some torches? Maybe they’ll be frightened by fire!”
“Dammit! Why the hell did they take away the policemen’s guns? They need to reissue them!”
“Shouldn’t we be getting back home, guys? When I think that my wife’s there all alone right now . . .”
“Aw, now you come on. We all have wives. These women are someone’s wives too.”
“That’s true, right enough . . .”
“Maybe we could get up on the roofs? From the roofs we could use something to . . . you know . . .”
“What are you going to reach them with, cretin? That stick of yours?”
“Oh, the lousy bastards!” the contemptuous bass suddenly bellowed in loathing. He got a running start, strained hard, and flung his metal pole at the long-suffering food stall: it pierced straight through the plywood wall. Black-tail’s gang looked at it in surprise, paused for a moment, and then went back to devouring the cucumbers and potatoes. The women in the windows burst into derisive laughter.
“Well, anyway,” someone said judiciously. “At least by being here, we keep them here, we constrain their actions, so to speak. That’s something, at least. While we’re here, they’ll be afraid of moving farther into the City . . .”
Everyone gazed around and then suddenly started babbling, and the judicious individual was rapidly forced to pipe down. First, it turned out that the baboons were moving farther into the City, notwithstanding the presence of said judicious individual. And second, even if the baboons had not been moving farther in, was this judicious individual planning to spend the night here? Live here? Sleep here? Crap and piss here?
At that moment they heard the lazy clip-clopping of hooves and the creaking of a cart; everyone looked up the street and fell silent. Approaching along the roadway at a leisurely pace was a two-horse cart. Sitting sideways on it, dozing with his legs dangling in their crude tarpaulin-fabric boots, was a large man in a faded, Russian-style army tunic and cotton breeches faded to match. The man’s bowed head was crowned with a mop of light brown hair.
He was holding the reins slackly in his huge brown hands. The horses—one chestnut, the other dapple gray—moved their feet lazily and also seemed to be dozing on the move.
“He’s going to the market,” someone said respectfully. “A farmer.”
“Right, guys, the farmers have it easy with this—when will these bastards ever reach them . . . ?”
“Actually, when I imagine baboons in the crops . . .”
Feeling curious, Andrei took a closer look. He had never seen a farmer before in all the time he had spent in the City, although he had heard a lot about these people—supposedly they were dour folk and a bit on the wild and weird side. They lived far away in wild places, where they waged a harsh struggle against swamps and jungles, they only drove into the City to sell the produce from their farms, and unlike the City people, they never changed their profession.
As the cart slowly moved closer, the driver’s lowered head trembled and from time to time, without waking up, he smacked his lips and jerked lightly on the reins. Suddenly the baboons, who had been in a relatively peaceable mood so far, flew into a state of extremely vicious agitation. Perhaps the horses annoyed them, or perhaps they had finally grown tired of the presence of outsiders on their street, but they suddenly started kicking up a ruckus and tearing around with their fangs glittering, and several of the most feisty scrambled up the drainpipes onto the roofs and started smashing the tiles up there.
One of the first pieces hit the driver of the cart right between his shoulder blades. The farmer started, straightened up, and looked around at his surroundings with his bloodshot eyes wide open. The first person he noticed was the intellectual type in glasses, who was returning from his futile pursuit, a solitary figure looming up behind the cart. Without saying a word, the farmer dropped the reins (the horses immediately stopped), jumped down off the cart, and darted toward his assailant, swinging back his arm as he went, but just then another piece of roof tile struck the intellectual type on the top of his head. He gasped, dropped his metal pole, and squatted down on his haunches, clutching his head in his hands. The farmer stopped, bewildered. Pieces of broken tile fell onto the road surface around him, shattering into orange crumbs.
“Brigade, take cover!” Fritz commanded valiantly, and darted toward the nearest entryway. Everyone scattered, dashing in all directions. Andrei huddled against the wall in the dead zone, watching curiously as the farmer gazed around himself in total bewilderment, clearly unable to fathom even a single little thing. His clouded gaze slid over the cornices and the drainpipes draped with raging baboons. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, then opened his eyes wide again and exclaimed in a loud voice, “Hell’s fucking bells!”
“Take cover,” they shouted to him from all sides. “Hey, whiskers! Get over here! You’ll catch one to the dome, you swampland simpleton!”
“What the hell’s going on?” the farmer asked loudly, turning toward the intellectual type, who was crawling around on all fours, trying to find his glasses. “Who are all this lot here, can you tell me?”
“Monkeys, naturally,” the intellectual type responded haughtily. “Surely you can see that for yourself, my man?”
“Well now, the things that go on round here,” the dumbfounded farmer exclaimed, only now waking up completely. “You’re always coming up with something or other . . .”
This son of the swamps was in a philosophical and well-disposed mood now. Having satisfied himself that the offense he had suffered could not really be regarded as such, he was simply rather flabbergasted by the sight of the shaggy hordes frisking along the cornices and clambering up the streetlamps. He merely shook his head reproachfully and scratched his beard. But at this point the intellectual type finally found his glasses, picked up his pole, and dashed lickety-split for cover, so the farmer was left in the middle of the roadway all on his lonesome—the only target, and a rather tempting one for the hairy snipers. The highly disadvantageous nature of this position was not slow in revealing itself. A dozen large shards crashed down, shattering at his feet, and smaller debris started drumming on his shaggy head and his shoulders.
“What the hell is all this?” the farmer roared. A new shard slammed into his forehead. The farmer stopped speaking and dashed lickety-split for his cart.
The cart was exactly opposite Andrei, and at first he thought the farmer would slump sideways onto it, send the whole damned shebang to blazes and race off to his swamps, as far away as possible from this dangerous place. But the man with the beard had no intention of sending the whole damned shebang to blazes. Muttering “You damn whores . . .” he started hastily unlashing the load on his cart with great dexterity. His broad back blocked Andrei’s view of what he was doing there, but the women in the house opposite could see everything—they all suddenly started squealing at once, slammed their windows shut and disappeared from sight. Before Andrei could even blink, the hirsute farmer had squatted down on his haunches, and a thick gun barrel, gleaming with an oily shimmer, rose up above his head, pointing toward the roofs.
“As you were!” Fritz roared, and Andrei saw him dash out from somewhere on the right, moving toward the cart in huge bounds.
“Now, you bastards, you shits . . .” the bearded man muttered, performing some kind of intricate, extremely deft movements with his hands, to an accompaniment of slithering metallic clicks and jangling. Andrei tensed up in anticipation of thunder and flame, and the monkeys on the roof apparently sensed something too. They stopped hurling themselves about, hunkered down on their tails, and started twisting their dogs’ heads to and fro, exchanging their comments on something in dry clicks.
But Fritz was already beside the cart. He grabbed the bearded man by the shoulder and repeated peremptorily, “As you were!”
“Hold on!” the bearded man muttered irascibly, jerking his shoulder. “Hold on, will you, just let me cut them down, the long-tailed bastards . . .”
“I gave you an order—as you were!” Fritz barked.
Then the bearded man turned his face toward Fritz and slowly stood up. “What’s the problem?” he asked, drawling the words with immense contempt. He was the same height as Fritz, but noticeably broader then him across the shoulders and below the waist.
“Where did you get a gun?” Fritz asked abruptly. “Show me your papers!”
“Why, you little snot!” the bearded man said in baleful amazement. “He wants my papers! How do you like this, you white-haired louse?”
Fritz disregarded the obscene gesture. Still looking the bearded man straight in the eye, he barked loud enough for the whole street to hear: “Ruhmer! Voronin! Friese! Come here!”
Andrei was surprised to hear his own name, but he immediately pushed off from the wall and walked over to the cart, taking his time. From the other side, moving at a brisk jog, came sloping-shouldered Ruhmer—in the past he had been a professional boxer—and, running at full speed, one of Fritz’s cronies, the small, skinny Otto Friese, a consumptive youth with large jug ears.
“Come on, come on . . .” the farmer kept muttering with an ominous leer as he observed all these preparations for combat.
“I urgently request once again that you present your papers,” Fritz repeated with icy politeness.
“And you can stick your request up your backside,” the bearded man responded indolently. He was looking mostly at Ruhmer now, and he had set his hand, as if by chance, on the handle of an impressive looking whip ingeniously woven out of rawhide.
“Guys, guys!” Andrei admonished them. “Listen, soldier, drop it, don’t argue, we’re from City Hall.”
“Fuck your City Hall up the ass,” the soldier replied, examining Ruhmer balefully from head to toe.
“Well, what’s the problem here?” Ruhmer inquired in a quiet, very husky voice.
“You know perfectly well,” Fritz said to the bearded man, “that guns are prohibited within city limits. Especially machine guns. If you have a permit, I request you to present it.”
“An
d just who are you to go asking for my permit? Are you the police or something? Some kind of gestapo?”
“We are a voluntary self-defense brigade.”
The bearded man smirked. “Well, defend yourselves then. If you’re a self-defense brigade, who’s stopping you?”
A regular full-tilt jawing session was brewing up. The brigade gradually gathered around the cart. Even some of the local male population crept out of entrances—some with fire tongs, some with pokers, and some with chair legs. They gazed inquisitively at the bearded man, at the ominous machine gun perched upright on the tarpaulin, at something rounded and glassy, glinting under the tarpaulin sheet. They sniffed—the farmer was enveloped in a distinctive atmosphere, compounded of the odors of sweat, garlic sausage, and strong liquor . . .
Andrei was surprised at the strange tenderness he felt as he examined the faded army tunic with the sweat stains under the armpits and a solitary, small bronze button (not even fastened) on the collar, the fore-and-aft cap with the mark left by a five-pointed star, tilted down over the right eyebrow in familiar fashion, the massive, tarpaulin-fabric, shit-crusher boots—the immense beard was probably the only thing that seemed out of place, that didn’t fit the image . . . And then it occurred to him that for Fritz all this must evoke quite different associations and sensations. He looked at Fritz. The former Unterleutnant was standing erect, with his lips compressed into a thin line and his nose gathered into contemptuous creases, trying to freeze the bearded man with the glare of his steely gray, genuinely Aryan eyes.
“We’re not required to have permits,” the bearded man drawled in the meantime. “We’re not required to do anything at all, except feed you spongers.”