“Alexander Ivanovich,” pronounced the stranger, looking fixedly in my eyes and smiling tenderly, “but you are indeed tired. And you really want to rest.”
At once I felt that I was falling asleep. My eyelids seemed glued together. I wasn’t interested in talk. I wasn’t interested in anything. I had an overpowering desire to sleep.
“It has been an exceptional pleasure to make your acquaintance,” the stranger said quietly.
I watched as he grew paler and paler and slowly dissolved in the air, leaving behind a scent of expensive cologne. Somehow I spread the mattress on the floor, stuck my face in the pillow, and was instantly asleep.
I was awakened by the flapping of wings and unpleasant clackings of beak. The room was filled with a peculiar bluish glow. On the stove, the griffin rustled about, beat his wings on the ceiling, and screamed disgustingly. I sat up and looked about. Right in the middle of the room, a burly fellow dressed in working pants and loud sport shirt hung suspended in the air. He soared over the umclidet, and without touching it, made smooth swimming motions over it with his great bony hands.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
The lout glanced at me briefly under his shoulder and turned away.
“I don’t hear a reply,” I said angrily. I was still very sleepy.
“Quiet, you mortal,” the lout said hoarsely. He ceased his passes and took the cylinder off the floor. His voice seemed familiar.
“Hey, friend!” I said menacingly. “Put the gadget back and clear out.”
The fellow looked at me, his jaw outthrust. I threw off the sheet and stood up.
“What say you put down the umclidet!” I said in full voice.
The fellow sank slowly down, and planting his feet firmly on the floor, took a stance. It got a lot lighter in the room, though the little lamp was not on.
“Child,” said the fellow. “Night is for sleeping. Best you lie down.”
The fellow clearly didn’t mind a good bout. But then, I didn’t either.
“Shall we go out in the yard?” I offered in a businesslike manner, hitching up my shorts.
Someone suddenly declaimed with expression, “Concentrating my thoughts on the highest, I, delivered of lust and self-love, cured of mental arrogance, fight on, Arjuna!”
I started. So did the sporty fellow.
“Bhagavad Gita,” said the voice. “Song the third, verse thirty.”
“It’s the mirror,” I said automatically.
“I know that myself,” said the fellow.
“Put down the umclidet!” I demanded.
“What’s with you, screaming like a sick elephant?” said my man. “It’s not yours, is it?”
“And maybe it belongs to you?”
“Yes, it does!”
I was struck with a surmise.
“So you dragged off the sofa, too?”
“Don’t stick your nose in other people’s business,” advised he.
“Give back the sofa,” I said. “A receipt has been made out for it.”
“Go to hell!” said the fellow, glancing behind him.
At which point, two more appeared in the room: one portly and one thin, both in striped pajamas, reminiscent of Sing-Sing inmates.
“Korneev!” yelled Portly. “So it’s you thieving the sofa? What a disgrace!”
“You can all go—” said the lout.
“You are a foul-mouthed ruffian!” yelled Portly. “You should be expelled! I will put in a complaint about you!”
“So, go ahead,” Korneev said gloomily. “It’s your favorite occupation.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me in that vein! You are a callow youngster! You are impudent! You have forgotten your umclidet here! The young man could have been injured.”
“I’ve been injured,” I mixed in. “The sofa is gone, I have to sleep like a dog, every night there are arguments…and the eagle there stinks…”
Portly turned to me instantly.
“An unheard-of violation of discipline,” he proclaimed. “You should complain… As for you, you should be ashamed!” he said, turning to Korneev again.
Korneev was dourly stuffing the umclidet behind his cheek.
The thin man suddenly spoke out softly but ominously.
“Did you remove the Thesis, Korneev?”
The lout grinned darkly.
“There is no Thesis, of course,” he said. “Why do you keep on simpering about it? If you don’t want us to steal the sofa, then let us have another translator…”
“You did read the order forbidding the removal of items from the keep?” the thin man demanded, all grim.
Korneev stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed at the ceiling.
“Are you informed of the decision of the Learned Council?” inquired the thin man, again.
“I am informed, comrade Demin, that Monday begins on Saturday,” Korneev said gloomily.
“Don’t start in with that kind of demagogy,” said the thin man. “Return the sofa at once and don’t dare come back here again.”
“I will not return the sofa,” said Korneev. “When the experiment is finished, then we’ll return it.”
Portly made a revolting spectacle of himself. “Insubordination!” he screeched. “Hooliganism!” The griffin took to agitated screaming again. Without taking his hands out of his pockets, Korneev turned his back on them and stepped through the wall. Portly took off after him, yelling, “Oh, no! You are going to return the sofa!”
The thin man said to me, “It’s all a misunderstanding. We’ll take measures so it won’t happen again.” He nodded his head and also advanced toward the wall.
“Wait!” I cried out. “The eagle! Take the eagle! With the stench!”
The thin man, already half imbedded in the wall, turned around and beckoned the eagle with his finger. The griffin flung itself noisily off the stove and was drawn in under his fingernail. The thin man disappeared. The blue light faded slowly. It became dark and rain resumed its drumming on the windowpanes. I turned on the light and looked the room over. Everything in it was as before, except for the deep gouges on the stove from the griffin’s claws and the senseless and wild footprints on the ceiling.
“The clear butter, formed in cows,” pronounced the mirror with idiotic profundity, “does not contribute to its nourishment, but it provides the best food value, when properly processed.”
I turned off the light and lay down. I am going to hear plenty from the crone tomorrow, I thought.
Chapter 6
“No,” he replied in answer to the insistent question in my eyes. “I am not a member of the club, I am a—ghost.”
“Very well, but that does not give you the right to saunter about the club.”
H. G. Wells
In the morning, it turned out that the sofa was standing in its place. I was not surprised. I only thought that, one way or the other, the crone had achieved her purpose: the sofa was in one corner and I was lying in the other. Picking up the bedding and doing my exercises, I cogitated that there probably existed some limit to the capacity of being surprised. Apparently I had overstepped that limit by a large margin. I was actually experiencing a sort of lassitude. I attempted to imagine anything that could now astonish me, but all my fantasizing proved inadequate. I didn’t like that the least bit since I couldn’t stand people incapable of being astonished. True, I was far from the attitude of “So what, I’ve seen it before.” My condition more closely approximated that of Alice in Wonderland. I was in a dreamlike state and accepted, or was ready to accept, any wonder that called for a more varied reaction than an open mouth and blinking eyes, as something I should expect.
I was still doing my setting-up exercises, when a door banged in the entry, heels tapped and scraped, someone coughed, something crashed and fell, and an authoritative voice called out: “Comrade Gorynitch!”
The old woman did not respond, and voices in the entry began to converse.
“What is that door…? Aha, I see. And t
his one?”
“This is the entrance to the museum.”
“And here? What’s this—everything is locked up…”
“An exceedingly well-managed woman, Janus Poluektovich. And this is the telephone.”
“And where is the famous sofa? In the museum?”
“No. The repository should be right here.”
“It’s here,” said a familiar gloomy voice.
The door to my room swung open and a tall, spare old man with magnificent snow-white hair but black eyebrows, black moustache, and deep black eyes, appeared on the threshold. Seeing me (I stood in shorts only, arms to the side, feet apart to the breadth of my shoulders), he stopped and said in a resonant voice, “So!”
To his right and left more faces were peering into the room. I said, “I beg your pardon,” and trotted toward my jeans. However, no attention was paid me. Four came into the room and crowded around the sofa. I knew two of them: the gloomy Korneev, unshaved, with red eyes, and in the same frivolous Hawaiian shirt; and the swarthy hawk-nosed Roman, who winked at me, turning away at once. The white-haired one, I didn’t know. Likewise, I didn’t know the portly tall man in the black suit with shiny back and wide proprietary gestures.
“This sofa, here?” asked the shiny-suited man.
“It’s not a sofa,” Korneev said morosely. “It’s a translator.”
“To me it’s a sofa,” declared the shiny-suited one, looking at a notebook. “Sofa, stuffed, oversize, inventory number eleven twenty-three.” He bent down and palpated. “Now you got it wet, Korneev; you’ve been lugging it about in the rain. Consider now: the springs rusted through, the upholstery rotting.”
“The value of the subject item,” said hawk-nosed Roman, in a mocking vein, it seemed to me, “does not lie at all in the upholstery and not even in the springs, of which there aren’t any”.
“You will please desist, Roman Petrovich,” suggested the shiny one with dignity. “Don’t be protecting your Korneev. The sofa is registered at the museum, as far as I am concerned, and that’s where it must be.”
“It’s an apparatus,” Korneev said hopelessly. “It’s being used in serious work…”
“I don’t know about that,” declared the shiny one. “I don’t know what kind of work that would be with the sofa.”
“But some of us do know,” said Roman very softly.
“You will desist,” said the shiny one, turning on him. “You are not in a beer hall, you are in a place of work here. What do you have in mind, substantively?”
“I am considering the fact that it’s not a sofa,” said Roman, “or in terms more within your reach, it’s not only a sofa. It’s an apparatus having the external appearance of a sofa.”
“I would ask you to desist from these insinuations,” said the shiny one with determination. “Regarding forms within reach and so forth. Let’s each of us do his job. My job is to stop this wanton misuse—and I am stopping it.”
“So,” said the white-haired one clearly. All were quiet at once. “I have been conversing with Cristobal Joseevich and Feodor Simeonovich. They suggest that the sofa represents purely a museum value. In its time, it belonged to King Rudolph the second, so that its historical value is beyond dispute. Besides, if my memory serves me right, about two years ago we ordered a standard translator. Do you remember who ordered it, Modest Matveevich?”
“One minute,” said the shiny Modest and started to leaf through his notebook rapidly. “One moment…translator, dual-powered, TDX-eight-OE, Kitezhgrad factory…per request of comrade Balsamo.”
“Balsamo works it round the clock,” said Roman.
“Brummagem, is what the TDX amounts to,” added Korneev. “It’s selectivity is on the molecular level.”
“Yes, yes,” said The Gray-hairs. “I am remembering now. There was a report on the test of the TDX. It’s true that the selectivity curve is not smooth…yes. And this…eh…sofa?”
“Handwork,” said Roman quickly. “Faultless. The craftsmanship of Leo Ben Beczalel. He assembled and tuned it for three hundred years…”
“There you are!” said the shiny Modest. “That’s the way to work! He was an old man, but he did it all himself.”
Suddenly the mirror coughed and said, “They all became younger, after staying an hour in the water, and came out of it just as rosy, good-looking, youthful. Healthy, and full of joie de vivre as they were at twenty.”
“Precisely,” said Modest. The mirror was talking in the gray-haired one’s voice.
The gray-haired one grimaced with distaste.
“Let’s not decide this question right now,” he said.
“When, then?” asked the rude Korneev.
“Friday, at the Learned Council.”
“We can’t devalue our relics,” inserted Modest Matveevich.
“And what are we going to do?” asked the rude Korneev.
The mirror boomed forth in a menacing voice as from beyond the grave:
“I saw it for myself, how, picking up their black skirts, there went, The barefooted Kanidia, hair undone, and howling, and with her, Sagana, the elder in years, both white of face and fearful to look upon. Then they both tore at the earth with fingernails and ripped the black lamb with their bare teeth.”
The gray-haired one, still grimacing in distaste, went up to the mirror, inserted his arm into it up to the shoulder, and snapped something inside. The mirror became quiet.
“So,” said the gray-haired one, “the question of your group will also be resolved at the council. As for you”—you could tell by his face that he had forgotten Korneev’s patronymic—“refrain for the time being…eh…from visiting the museum.”
With these words he left the room. Through the door.
“You’ve got your way,” said Korneev through his teeth, looking at Modest Matveevich.
“Wanton misuse, I’ll not allow,” he answered shortly, shoving the notebook in his inside pocket.
“Misuse!” said Korneev. “You don’t give a hang about all that. Accountancy is what bothers you. Reluctance to enter an extra item.”
“Will you desist,” said the unbending Modest. “We’ll appoint a commission yet and we’ll see if perhaps the relic has been damaged…”
“Inventory number eleven twenty-three,” added Roman in a small voice.
“That’s how you have to accept it,” pronounced Modest Matveevich majestically. Then he turned and saw me. “And what are you doing here?” he inquired. “Why are you sleeping here?”
“I—” I began.
“You slept on the sofa,” proclaimed Modest in icy tones, boring through me with the gaze of the counterspy. “You know that it is an apparatus?”
“No,” I said. “I wean that now I know, of course.”
“Modest Matveevich!” exclaimed the hawk-nosed Roman. “But that’s our new computer expert, Sasha Privalov!”
“So, why is he sleeping here? Why isn’t he in the dorm?”
“He is not registered yet,” said Roman, grabbing me around the waist.
“All the more reason!”
“You mean, let him sleep in the street?” Roman asked angrily.
“You will kindly desist with that,” said Modest. “There’s the dorm, there is a hotel, and this here is a museum, a state institution. If everyone will take to sleeping in museums… Where are you from?”
“From Leningrad,” I said gloomily.
“And what if I come to Leningrad and go to bed in the Hermitage?”
“You are welcome to it,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
Roman kept holding me around the waist.
“Modest Matveevich, you are quite right, it is disorderly, but tonight he will sleep at my place.”
“That’s a different matter; that you are welcome to do,” Modest allowed magnanimously. He looked the room over with a proprietary eye, saw the prints on the ceiling, and immediately looked at my feet. Fortunately I was barefooted. “That’s how you have to accept it,” said he, then s
traightened the trash on the hanger and left the room.
“D-dumbbell,” squeezed out Korneev. “Blockhead.” He sat down on the sofa and lowered his head on his hands. “To hell with them all. Tonight I’ll drag it off again.”
“Take it easy,” Roman said gently. “Nothing terrible has happened. We just had some bad luck. Did you notice which Janus that was?”
“So?” said Korneev, despondent.
“That was Janus-A.”
Korneev raised his head. “And what’s the difference?”
“Tremendous!” said Roman and winked. “Because Janus-U has taken a plane to Moscow. And, it’s important among other things, in relation to this sofa. Did you grasp that, pillager of museum treasures?”
“Listen. You are my savior,” said Korneev, and for the first time I saw how he smiled.
“You see, Sasha,” said Roman, addressing me, “we have an ideal director. He is one director in two individuals. There is a Janus-A Poluektovich and a Janus-U Poluektovich. Janus-U is an important scientist with international stature. As for Janus-A, he is a rather ordinary administrator.”
“Twins?” I inquired cautiously.
“Of course not; it’s one and the same man. Only he exists as two persons.”
“Obviously,” I said, and started to put on my shoes.
“That’s all right, Sasha, you’ll get to know it all soon,” Roman said encouragingly.
I raised my head. “Meaning what?”
“We must have a computer man,” said Roman with deep sincerity.
“I need one very badly,” said Korneev, becoming animated.
“Everybody needs a programmer,” I said, returning my attention to the shoes. “And, please, no hypnotism or some charmed environments.”
“He’s catching on,” said Roman.
Korneev was going to say something when voices erupted outside the window.
“That’s not our five kopecks!” yelled Modest.
“Whose is it, then?”
“I don’t know whose it is! That’s not my affair! That’s your affair—to catch the counterfeiters, comrade Sergeant!”
“The five-kopeck piece was extracted from a certain Privalov, who is living here with you in the Iznakurnozh!”