“But what does Elsa think?” Andrei asked curiously. “She’s not insane, is she?”
Otto flushed bright crimson and started wiggling his ears. “Elsa . . .” he cleared his throat. “I’m working away there too, like a horse. It’s all the same to her: Fritz, Otto, Ivan, Abraham . . . The girl’s thirty years old, and Hofstadter doesn’t let anyone but Fritz and me get near her.”
“Well, you and Fritz are bad bastards!” Andrei said sincerely.
“As bad as they come!” Otto agreed sadly. “And you know what’s most terrible about it: I absolutely can’t imagine how we’re going to extricate ourselves from this business. I’m weak; I’ve got no character.”
They stopped talking, and all the way back Otto merely panted as he changed the hand holding the basket. He didn’t walk up the stairs.
“You take this up and put on some water in a large saucepan,” he said. “And give me some money, and I’ll run over to the shop—maybe I’ll be able to get some canned stuff.” He hesitated, turning his eyes away. “And don’t you . . . tell Fritz. Or he’ll shake the life out of me. You know what Fritz is like—likes to keep everything buttoned up and under wraps. Who doesn’t?”
They parted, and Andrei lugged the basket and the bag up the back staircase. The basket was incredibly heavy, as if Hofstadter had loaded it with cast-iron cannonballs. Yes, brother, Andrei thought bitterly. What sort of Experiment is it if there are things like this going on? How much experimenting can you get done with this Otto and this Fritz? Would you believe it, what bastards—no honor and no conscience. Where would they get them from? The Wehrmacht. The Hitlerjugend. Trash. Yes, I’ll have a word with Fritz! I can’t leave this the way it is—the man’s decaying morally in front of my very eyes. But he could be a real human being! He must! When you get right down to it, you could say he saved my life that time. They could have just slid a knife under my shoulder blade, and that would have been it. Everyone shit their pants, everyone all went belly-up. All except for Fritz. No, he is a human being. I have to fight for him . . .
He slipped on the traces of baboon activity, swore, and started watching where he put his feet.
The moment he stepped inside the kitchen, he realized everything in the apartment had changed. The phonograph was booming and hissing in the dining room. He heard the clatter of dishes and the shuffling of dancing feet. And rumbling out over and above all these other sounds was the familiar bass voice of his excellency Yurii Konstantinovich: “You, brother, all that stuff about the economics and sociology—we don’t need it. We’ll get by without. But freedom, brother, now that’s a different matter. Freedom’s worth breaking your back for.”
Water was already boiling up in a large saucepan on the gas cooker, a freshly sharpened knife was lying, ready and waiting, on the kitchen table, and there was a ravishing aroma of meat coming from the oven. Two paunchy sacks were standing in the corner of the kitchen, propped against each other, and lying on top of them were an oil-soaked wadded jacket with burn holes, a familiar whip, and some kind of harness. The familiar machine gun was standing right there too—assembled and ready for use, with a flat, burnished metal magazine protruding from the breech. A glass carboy was gleaming with an oily glint under the table, with corn shuckings and pieces of straw stuck to it.
Andrei put down the basket and the bag. “Hey, you loafers!” he yelled. “The water’s boiling!”
Davydov’s rumbling bass fell silent, and Selma appeared in the doorway, red-faced and with her eyes glowing. Fritz towered up behind her shoulder. Apparently they had just been dancing, and the Aryan had no intention of taking his massive red paws off Selma’s waist just yet.
“Hofstadter sends you his greetings!” said Andrei. “Elsa is concerned that you don’t call round. The child will be a month old soon, after all!”
“Stupid jokes!” Fritz declared in disgust, but he took his paws away. “Where’s Otto?”
“It’s true, the water is boiling!” Selma declared in surprise. “Now what do we do with it?”
“Take the knife,” said Andrei, “and start peeling the potatoes. And I think you’re very fond of potato salad, aren’t you, Fritz? So you get on with it, and I’ll go and play the part of the host.”
He was about to walk into the dining room, but Izya Katzman intercepted him in the doorway. His face was glowing ecstatically.
“Listen,” he said, giggling and spraying. “Where did you get that remarkable character from? It seems like they’ve got a genuine Wild West down on the farms. American wide-open spaces!”
“Russian wide-open spaces are every bit as good as American ones,” Andrei said peevishly.
“Oh yes! Oh yes!” Izya shouted. “‘When the Jewish Cossacks rebelled, there was a coup, a coup in Birobidzhan, and if anyone tries to take our Berdichev, a boil will spring up on his belly!’”
“You drop that,” Andrei said sternly. “I don’t like it . . . Fritz, I’m placing Selma and Katzman under your command: work, and quickly. I’m hungry—I’m starving . . . And don’t yell in here—Otto will be knocking, he dashed off to get some canned stuff.”
Having put everyone in their places, Andrei hurried into the dining room, where first of all he exchanged a firm handshake with Yurii Konstantinovich.
Yurii Konstantinovich, still as red-faced and strong-smelling as ever, was standing in the middle of the room with his feet planted wide apart in their tarpaulin-fabric boots and his hands stuck into his soldier’s belt. His eyes were merry and slightly wild—Andrei had often seen eyes like that in the faces of harum-scarum men who liked hard work and strong drink, and had no fear of anything on Earth. “There!” said Davydov. “I’ve come, just as I promised. Have you seen the big bottle? That’s for you. The potatoes are for you too—two sacks. They wanted to give me, you know, a certain something for them, but I thought what the hell do I want all this for? I’ll drive them round to a good man instead. They live here, rotting away in their stone mansions, never seeing the light of day . . . Listen, Andrei, I was just telling Kensi here, the Japanese, I told him: Give it all up, guys! What is there round here that you haven’t seen already? Collect up your little kids, your women, your girls, and all come on out to us . . .”
Kensi, still in uniform after his spell of duty but with his tunic unbuttoned, was working away awkwardly with one hand, trying to set the table with miscellaneous dishes. His left hand was bound up with a bandage. He smiled and nodded to Davydov. “That’s what it will come to, Yura,” he said. “Next there’ll be an invasion of squids, and then every last one of us will move out to those swamps of yours.”
“Ah, why bother to wait for those . . . what-d’you-call-ems . . . To hell with those damned squids. Tomorrow morning I’m leaving empty, nothing in the cart—I can easily load up three families. You’re not a family man, are you?” he asked, turning to Andrei.
“God has spared me,” said Andrei.
“Then who’s this girl to you? Or isn’t she yours?”
“She’s new here. Just arrived last night.”
“So what could be better? A pleasant young lady. Take her and let’s go, eh? We’ve got air out there. We’ve got milk out there. You probably haven’t drunk any fresh milk in a year, have you? And I keep on wondering why there’s no milk in your shops. I’ve got three cows all to myself. I hand over that milk to the state, I feed myself with it, I feed the pigs with it, I pour it away on the ground . . . You settle at our place, you’ll see, and you’ll wake up in the morning to go out into the field and your very own cow will give you a pitcher of steaming-fresh milk—straight from the cow, eh?” He winked strenuously with both eyes, one after the other, laughed, whacked Andrei on the shoulder, then set off across the room, making the floorboards creak loudly, stopped the phonograph, and came back again. “And the air there! You haven’t even got any air left here—you’ve got a menagerie here, that’s all the air you’ve got. Kensi, why keep making it so hard on yourself? Call the girl, let her set the table.”
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“She’s peeling potatoes in there,” Andrei said with a smile. Then he pulled himself up short and started helping Kensi. Davydov was a really great guy. He felt very close to him, as if they’d known each other for a whole year already. So . . . what if he really did it—took off to the swamps? Milk or no milk, the life there had to be really healthy. Just look at the way Davydov was standing there, like a statue!
“Someone’s knocking,” Davydov told him. “Shall I open up or will you go yourself?”
“Just a moment,” Andrei said, and went to the front door. Standing outside the door was Wang—without his wadded jacket now, wearing a blue serge shirt down to his knees and a waffle-weave towel wrapped around his head.
“They brought the cans!” he said with a joyful smile.
“So screw them then,” Andrei responded no less joyfully. “The cans can wait. Why are you alone? Where’s Mei-lin?”
“She’s at home,” said Wang. “She’s very tired. She’s sleeping. Our son’s taken sick.”
“Well come in, don’t just stand there . . . Come on, I’ll introduce you to a fine human being.”
“We’ve already met,” Wang said as he walked into the dining room.
“Ah, Vanya!” Davydov shouted delightedly. “So you’re here as well! Yes,” he said, turning back to Kensi, “I knew Andrei was a regular guy. Look, all the good people get together at his place. Take you, now, or that little Jew . . . what’s his name . . . Well, now we’ll have a whale of a feast! I’ll go and take a look at what they’re fiddling with for so long in there. There’s nothing at all to do, and they’ve made a huge job out of it . . .”
Wang quickly squeezed Kensi away from the table and began neatly and deftly rearranging the knives and forks. Kensi adjusted his bandage with his free hand and his teeth. Andrei waded in to help him. “Donald still hasn’t shown up,” he said in a concerned voice.
“He locked himself in,” Wang responded. “Said he wasn’t to be disturbed.”
“He’s been down in the dumps recently for some reason, guys. OK, forget about him. Listen, Kensi, what’s wrong with your hand?”
Kensi pulled a wry face as he answered. “A baboon snapped at me. What a bastard—bit right through to the bone.”
“You don’t say!” Andrei exclaimed, astonished. “I thought they were kind of placid.”
“Sure, very placid . . . When someone catches you and starts riveting a collar round your neck . . .”
“What collar?”
“Directive 57. All baboons are to be registered and fitted with a numbered collar. Tomorrow we’re going to distribute them to members of the public. Well, we ringed about twenty of them and herded the others over into the next precinct; they can sort them out. Why are you just standing there with your mouth hanging open? Let’s have some shot glasses—there aren’t enough shot glasses . . .”
4
When the sun was turned off, the entire company was already flying high. In the darkness that instantly fell, Andrei clambered out from behind the table and made his way over to the light switch, along the way kicking over some saucepans or other standing on the floor. “Don’ you be frightened, sweet fräulein,” Fritz babbled behind him. “That’s what always happens here . . .”
“Let there be light!” Andrei declared, articulating the words laboriously.
The dusty lightbulb on the ceiling lit up. The light was pitiful, just like in the passage to the courtyard. Andrei turned around and surveyed the gathering.
Everything was absolutely fine. Ensconced at the head of the table, swaying slightly on his kitchen stool, was Yurii Konstantinovich Davydov, who half an hour earlier had finally and irrevocably become “Uncle Yura” to Andrei. Uncle Yura had a brawny roll-up smoking between his firmly clenched teeth and a thick glass tumbler clutched in his right hand, and he was waving the calloused index finger of his left hand through the air in front of the nose of Izya Katzman, who was sitting beside him, now entirely bereft of his tie and jacket, and with traces of meat sauce clearly displayed on the collar and chest of his shirt.
Wang was sitting modestly on Uncle Yura’s right; in front of him he had the very smallest plate, with a small piece of something on it, and the most battered fork, and for the moonshine he had taken himself a glass with a chipped edge. His head had sunk completely down into his shoulders and his face was raised, with the eyes closed and a blissful smile on the lips: Wang was basking in his peace.
Sharp-eyed Kensi, his cheeks brightly flushed, was snacking with gusto on sauerkraut and rendering an enthusiastic account of something to Otto, who was battling heroically against drowsiness, exclaiming in his brief moments of victory, “Yes! Of course! Yes! Oh, yes!”
Selma Nagel, the Swedish tramp, was out-and-out gorgeous. She was sitting in an armchair, with her legs thrown over the soft armrest, and those gleaming legs were exactly level with the chest of the bold Unter-officer Fritz, so Fritz’s eyes were blazing, and in his excitement he had broken out in red blotches. He kept thrusting his full glass at Selma, repeatedly attempting to drink to Bruderschaft with her, but Selma pushed him away with her own glass, laughed, swung her legs about, and from time to time brushed Fritz’s hairy, fondling paw off her knees.
Andrei’s chair on the other side of Selma was the only one that was empty, apart from the chair set out for Donald, also sadly vacant. What a pity Donald’s not here, Andrei thought. But we’ll survive—we’ll even get through that! We’ve had to cope with worse things . . . His thoughts were a little confused, but his general mood was spunky, with a light veneer of the tragic. He went back to his place, picked up a glass, and roared, “A toast!”
No one took any notice of him except Otto, who merely jerked his head like a horse bitten by gadflies and responded, “Yes! Oh, yes!”
“I came here because I believed!” Uncle Yura boomed in his deep bass voice, not giving the giggling Izya a chance to remove that gnarled finger from under his nose. “And I believed because there was nothing else left to believe in. And a Russian has to believe in something, don’t you see, brother? If he doesn’t believe in anything, there’ll be nothing left but vodka. Even to make love to a woman, you’ve got to have faith. You have to believe in yourself; without faith you’ll never even get it up.”
“That’s right, that’s right!” Izya responded. “Take away a Jew’s belief in God and a Russian’s belief in the Good Czar, and they become capable of all sorts of diabolical things.”
“No . . . hang on! Jews are a special case . . .”
“The most important thing, Otto, is to take things easy,” Kensi was saying at the same time, crunching with relish on his cabbage. “There isn’t any training anyway—there simply can’t be any. Think about it: who needs professional training in a city where everyone is constantly changing his profession?”
“Oh, yes!” Otto responded, his mind clearing for a second. “I said the same thing to the minister.”
“And what did the minister say?” asked Kensi, picking up his glass of moonshine and taking a few small sips, as if he were drinking tea.
“The minister said that it was an extremely interesting idea and suggested that I should draft a detailed proposal.” Otto sniffed and tears welled up in his eyes. “But instead of that I went to see Elsa . . .”
“And when the tank was only about two meters away from me,” Fritz droned, spilling moonshine on Selma’s white legs, “I remembered everything! You wouldn’t believe it, fräulein, all the years of my life flashed by in front of my eyes . . . But I’m a soldier! With the name of the führer—”
“Ah, your führer’s been gone for ages!” Selma kept trying to drum into his head, laughing so hard that she cried. “They burned that führer of yours!”
“Fräulein!” Fritz declared, thrusting his jaw forward menacingly. “In the heart of every true German, the führer still lives! The führer will live on down through the ages! You are an Aryan, fräulein, you can understand me: when th’Russian tank . . . only th
ree meters away . . . with the name of the führer on my lips, I . . .”
“Ah, I’m sick of you and your führer!” Andrei yelled at him. “Guys! Come on, you bastards! Listen to the toast, will you?”
“A toast?” exclaimed Uncle Yura, suddenly getting the idea. “Come on! Go to it, Andriukha!”
“Fortheladiespresent!” Otto suddenly blurted out, shoving Kensi away from him.
“You shut up, will you!” Andrei barked. “Izya, stop grinning like that! I’m being serious! Kensi, damn you! Guys, I think we should drink . . . we’ve already drunk to it, but only sort of in passing, and we need to drink fundamentally, seriously, to our Experiment, to our noble cause, and especially—”
“To the inspirer of all our victories, Comrade Stalin!” Izya roared.
That put Andrei off his stride. “No, listen,” he mumbled. “What are you interrupting me for? OK, to Stalin too, of course . . . Damn, now you’ve completely thrown me . . . I wanted us to drink to friendship, you fool!”
“Never mind, never mind, Andriukha,” said Uncle Yura. “It’s a good toast: we ought to drink to the Experiment, and we ought to drink to friendship too. Boys, raise your glasses, we’ll drink to friendship and to everything turning out just fine.”
“And I’ll drink to Stalin,” Selma piped up stubbornly. “And to Mao Tse-tung. Hey, Mao Tse-tung, do you hear, I’m drinking to you,” she shouted at Wang.