“What are you screaming for?” I asked. “Do you want some valerian drops?”
“Have any vodka?”
“No.”
“Some wine, then?”
“Nothing. What did you bring over for me?”
“My Nobel Prize!” he shouted. “I brought over my Nobel, that’s what! But not for you, you idiot! You have enough problems of your own.” He attacked his jacket, pulling off the top button and cursing. “There aren’t too many idiots nowadays,” he announced. “In our times, buddy, the majority quite rightly supposes that it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick. We don’t need much: a trainload of bread and a trainload of caviar, and the caviar can be black and the bread white. This isn’t the nineteenth century, buddy,” he said sincerely. “The nineteenth century is dead and buried, and everything that’s left of it is smoke and nothing more, buddy. I didn’t sleep all night. Zakhar snores and so does that freak son of his. I spent the whole night bidding farewell to the remnants of the nineteenth century in my consciousness. The twentieth century, buddy, is all calculation and no emotion! Emotion, as we all know, is lack of information and nothing more. Pride, honor, future generations—all aristocratic babble. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. I can’t do that. I don’t know how, ta-ta! A question of values? If you like. The most valuable thing in the world is my identity, my family, and my friends. The rest can go to hell. The rest is outside the parameters of my responsibility. Fight? Of course. For myself. My family; my friends. To the end, without mercy. But for humanity? For the dignity of earthlings? For galactic prestige? The hell with it! I don’t fight for words! I have more important things to worry about. You can do as you like. But I don’t recommend being an idiot.”
He jumped up and headed for the kitchen, a huge dirigible in the hallway. Water gushed from the sink.
“Our entire everyday life,” he shouted from the kitchen, “is a continuous chain of deals! You have to be a total idiot to make an unprofitable deal! They knew that even in the nineteenth century!” He stopped, and I could hear him gulping. Then the water stopped running, and Weingarten came back into the room, wiping his mouth. “Vecherovsky won’t give you any good advice. He’s a robot, not a man. And a nineteenth-century robot at that. If they had known how to make robots in the nineteenth century they would have made them like Vecherovsky. Look, you can consider me a vile person. I don’t argue. But I’m not going to let anyone wipe me out; no one. Not for anything. A living dog is better than a dead lion. And a living Weingarten is a hell of a lot better than a dead Weingarten. That’s Weingarten’s point of view, and that of his family and friends, I trust.”
I didn’t interrupt. I’ve known that big-faced lug for a quarter century, and not just any century, but the twentieth. He was shouting like that because he had pigeonholed everything in his own mind. There was no point in interrupting, because he wouldn’t have heard me. Until Weingarten has pigeonholed everything, you can argue with him as an equal, like with an ordinary mortal, and can even change his mind. But Weingarten, with everything settled, becomes a tape recorder on playback. Then he shouts and becomes inordinately cynical—probably stems from an unhappy childhood.
So I listened to him in silence, waiting for the tape to end, and the only strange thing was the number of times he referred to living and dead Weingartens. He couldn’t have been frightened—he wasn’t me, after all. I’d seen all kinds of Weingartens: Weingarten in love, Weingarten the hunter, Weingarten the coarse oaf, and Weingarten wiped out. But this was a Weingarten I’d never seen: a frightened Weingarten. I waited for him to turn himself off for a few seconds to get another cigarette and asked just in case:
“Did they frighten you?”
He dropped the cigarettes and gave me the finger, a big, wet finger, across the table. He had been waiting for the question. The answer had also been prerecorded, not only in gestures, but orally as well:
“I like that—frightened me!” he said, waving his finger under my nose. “This isn’t the nineteenth century, you know. They used to frighten people in the nineteenth century. But they don’t bother with that nonsense in the twentieth. In the twentieth, they buy you off. They didn’t scare me, they bought me, understand, buddy? It’s a nice choice! Either they flatten you into a pancake or they give you a spanking-new institute over which two scientists have already back-bitten each other to death. I’ll do ten Nobel-winning projects at the institute, understand? Of course, the merchandise isn’t all bad, either. It’s sort of like my birthright. The right of Weingarten to have freedom of scientific curiosity. Not bad merchandise at all, buddy, don’t argue with me. But it’s been on the shelves too long. It belongs to the nineteenth century! Nobody has that freedom in the twentieth century anyway! You can take your freedom and spend all your life as a lab assistant, washing out test tubes. The institute is no mess of pottage, either! I’ll start ten ideas there, twenty ideas, and if they don’t like one or two, well, we’ll bargain again. There’s strength in numbers, buddy. Let’s not spit into the wind. When a heavy tank is headed straight for you and the only weapon you have is the head on your shoulders, you have to know enough to jump out of its way.”
He talked a lot longer, shouting, smoking, coughing hoarsely, running over to look into the empty bar, running away from it in disappointment, and shouting some more. Then he quieted down, ran out of words, leaned back in the armchair, rested his head on the back of the chair, and made distorted faces at the ceiling.
“All right, then,” I said. “But where are you taking your Nobel Prize? You should have taken it down to the boiler room; instead you lugged it up five flights to my place.”
“I’m taking it to Vecherovsky.”
I was amazed.
“What’s he going to do with your Nobel work?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Wait,” I said. “Did he call you?”
“No, I called him.”
“And?”
“What and?” He sat up in the chair and started buttoning his jacket. “I called him this morning and told him I choose the bird in hand.”
“And?”
“What and? And … he said, well then, bring your materials to me.”
We sat in silence.
“I don’t understand why he wants your materials.”
“Because he is Don Quixote!” Weingarten barked. “Because he’s never been pecked at by a barbecued chicken! Because he’s never bitten off more than he can chew.”
I suddenly understood.
“Listen, Val,” I said. “Don’t. The hell with him, he’s gone nuts! They’ll hammer him into the ground up to his neck! Who needs it?”
“What, then?” Weingarten asked greedily. “What?”
“Burn it, your damn revertase! Let’s burn it right now. In the bathtub.”
“Pity,” Weingarten said and looked away. “What a pity. The work … it’s first class. Extra special. Deluxe.”
I shut up. And he was out of the chair again, running back and forth across the room, out into the hall and back, and his tape was back on again too. It’s shameful, yes. Honor suffers, yes. His pride is hurt. Especially when you can’t tell anyone about it. But if you think about it, pride is sheer lunacy and nothing else. Just driving himself mad. Why, most people wouldn’t even think twice in our situation. And they’d call us idiots! And they’d be right. Have we never had to compromise before? Of course, hundreds of times! And will hundreds more! And not with gods, but with lousy bureaucrats, with nits who are too disgusting to touch.
His running in front of me, sweating and justifying himself, was getting me mad, and I said that it was one thing to compromise and another to capitulate. Oh, that did it! I got him badly. But I wasn’t sorry in the least. It wasn’t really him I was jabbing in the solar plexus, it was myself. Anyway, we had a fight, and he left. He took his bags and went up to Vecherovsky’s. At the door he said he’d be back later, but I told him that Irina was back, and he collapsed completely. He
doesn’t like it when people don’t like him.
I sat down at the desk and got to work. That is, not work, but organization. At first I kept expecting a bomb to go off under the table or a blue face with a noose around its neck to appear in my window. But nothing like that happened and I got caught up in the work, and then the doorbell rang again.
I didn’t go to answer it right away. First I went to the kitchen and got the meat hammer—an ominous thing: one side has spikes and the other side is an ax. If something went wrong, I’d let him have it between the eyes. I’m a peaceful man, I don’t like fights or arguments, or Weingarten either, but I’d had enough. Enough.
I opened the door. It was Zakhar.
“Hi, Dmitri, please, forgive me,” he said with an artificial casualness.
I looked down the hall against my will, but there was no one else. Zakhar was alone.
“Come in, come in. Happy to see you.”
“You see, I decided to look in on you.” Still in that same artificial tone that didn’t go at all with his shy smile and highly intelligent appearance. “Weingarten disappeared somewhere, damn him. I’ve been calling him all day, he’s out. And since I was coming over to see Philip, I thought I’d look in here and see, maybe he was here.”
“Philip?”
“No, no … Valentin … Weingarten.”
“He went to Philip’s,” I said.
“Oh, I see!” Zakhar said with great joy. “Long ago?”
“Over an hour.”
His face froze for a second when he saw the hammer in my hand.
“Fixing dinner?” he asked, and added, without waiting for an answer: “Well, I won’t get in your way. I’m off.” He started for the door, then stopped. “Oh yes, I almost forgot … I mean, I didn’t forget, I just don’t know. Which is Philip’s apartment?”
I told him.
“Ah, thank you. You see, he called and I … somehow forgot to ask … during the conversation.”
He backed up to the door and opened it.
“I understand,” I said. “And where’s your boy?”
“It’s all over for me!” he shouted joyfully, stepped over the threshold, and …
CHAPTER 10
Excerpt 20.… get me to do a major cleanup of this goat’s den. I barely got out of it. We agreed that I would finish my work, and Irina, since she had absolutely nothing else to do and was stir-crazy—she was incapable of just soaking in the tub and reading the latest issue of Foreign Literature—well, Irina would sort the laundry and take care of Bobchik’s room. And I promised to do our room, but not today, tomorrow. Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute. But it would sparkle spotlessly.
I settled in at my desk, and for a while everything was quiet and peaceful. I worked, and worked with pleasure, but it was an unusual sort of pleasure. I’d never experienced anything like it. I felt a strange, serious satisfaction, I was proud of myself and respected myself. I thought that a soldier who remains at the machine gun to cover his retreating comrades must feel like that. He knows he will be here forever, that he will never see anything other than the muddy field, the running figures in the enemy uniform, and the low, grim sky. And he also knows that it’s right, that it can be no other way, and is proud of it. And some watchman in my brain carefully and sensitively listened and watched while I worked, remembered that nothing had finished, that it was all continuing, and that right in the desk drawer lay the fearsome hammer with the ax blade on one side and the spikes on the other. And the watchman made me look up, because something happened in the room.
Actually, nothing particular had happened. Irina was standing in front of the desk, looking at me. And at the same time something had happened, something unexpected and wild, because Irina’s eyes were square and her lips were puffy. Before I could say anything Irina tossed a pink rag right on my papers, and as I picked it up I saw it was a bra.
“What’s this?” I asked, absolutely bewildered, looking at Irina and back at the bra.
“What does it look like?” Irina said in a strange voice, turned her back to me, and went to the kitchen.
Chilled by premonitions, I toyed with the pink lacy garment and couldn’t understand. What the hell? What does a bra have to do with anything? And then I remembered Zakhar’s women. I got scared for Irina. I threw down the bra and raced into the kitchen.
Irina was sitting on a stool, leaning on the table, her head in her hands. A cigarette burned between the fingers of her right hand.
“Don’t touch me,” she said calmly and cuttingly.
“Irina!” I said pathetically. “Are you all right?”
“You animal …” she muttered, pulled her hands away from her hair, and took a drag of the cigarette. I saw that she was crying.
An ambulance? That wouldn’t help, who needs an ambulance? Valerian drops? Bromides? God, look at her face. I grabbed a glass and filled it with tap water.
“Now I understand everything,” Irina said, inhaling nervously and pushing the glass away with her elbow. “The telegram and everything. Here we are. Who is she?”
I sat down and took a drink of the water.
“Who?” I asked dully.
For a second I thought she was going to hit me.
“That’s really something, you noble bastard,” she said in disgust. “You didn’t want to contaminate the connubial bed. How noble. So you took her into your son’s bed.”
I finished the water and tried to put down the glass but my hand wouldn’t obey me. A doctor! I kept thinking. My poor Irina, I must get a doctor!
“All right,” Irina said. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was staring out the window and smoking, inhaling every few seconds. “All right, there’s nothing to talk about. You always did say that love was an agreement. It always sounded so good: love, honesty, friendship. But you could have been more careful not to leave bras behind … Maybe there’s a pair of panties, too, if we look hard enough?”
It came to me in a blinding flash. I understood it all.
“Irina! God. You scared me so badly. You gave me such a scare.”
Of course, that wasn’t at all what she expected to hear, because she turned to me, with her pale, beautiful, tearstained face, and looked at me with such expectancy and hope that I almost began to cry myself. She wanted only one thing: for this to be cleared up, explained away as nonsense, a mistake, a crazy coincidence, as soon as possible.
That was the last straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore. I dumped the whole horror story and the madness of the last two days on her.
My story must have sounded like a joke at first. But I went on talking, paying attention to nothing, not giving her a chance to get in sarcastic comments. I just poured it out, without any particular order, not worrying about chronology. I saw her expression of suspicion and hope change to amazement, then anxiety, then fear, and, finally, pity.
We were in our room by then in front of the open window—she was in the chair and I was on the rug, leaning my cheek against her knee; there was a storm outside. A purple cloud poured itself out over the rooftops, pelting rain, frantic lightning bolts attacking the high-rise’s roof and disappearing into the building. Large cold drops fell on the windowsill and into the room. The wind gusts made the yellow drapes billow, but we sat motionless. She caressed my hair quietly. I felt enormous relief. I had talked it out. Gotten rid of half the weight. And I was resting, pressing my face against her smooth tan knee. The constant thunder made it hard to talk, but I had nothing else to say.
Then she said:
“Dmitri. You mustn’t think about me. You must make your decision as though I didn’t exist. Because I will be with you always anyway. No matter what you decide.”
I hugged her tight. I guess I knew she would say that and I guess the words really didn’t help, but I was grateful anyway.
“Forgive me,” she said after a pause, “but I still don’t have it quite clear in my own mind. No, I believe you, of course I do—it?
??s just that it’s all so terrible. Maybe there’s some other explanation, something more, well, simple, more understandable. I guess I’m saying it wrong. Vecherovsky is right of course, but not about it being the—what did he call it?—the Homeostatic Universe. He’s right that that’s not the point. Really, what’s the difference? If it’s the universe, you have to give in; if it’s aliens, you have to fight? But don’t listen to me. I’m just talking because I’m confused.”
She shivered. I got up, squeezed into the armchair with her and put my arms around her. All I wanted to do was tell her in every possible way how terrified I was. How terrified I was for myself, how terrified I was for her, how terrified I was for both of us. But that would have been pointless, and probably cruel.
I felt that if she didn’t exist I would have known exactly what to do. But she existed. And I knew that she was proud of me, always had been. I’m a rather dull person and not too successful, but even I could be an object of pride. I was a good athlete, always knew how to work, had a good mind; I was in good standing at the observatory, in good standing among our friends; I know how to have a good time, how to be witty, how to handle myself in friendly arguments. And she was proud of all of that. Maybe just a little, but proud nevertheless. I could see her looking at me sometimes. I just don’t know how she would react to my becoming a jellyfish. I probably wouldn’t even be able to love her the right way anymore, I’d be incapable of that, too.
As though reading my mind, she said:
“Remember how happy we were that all our exams were behind us and that we’d never have to take one again to our dying day? It seems they’re not all over. It seems there’s still one more.”
“Yes,” I said and thought: But this is one test where nobody knows whether an A or a D is a better grade. And there’s no way of knowing what gets you the A and the D.
“Dmitri,” she whispered, her face close to mine. “You must really have invented something great for them to be after you. You really should be very proud, you and the others. Mother Nature herself is after you!”