I turned around. Standing behind me looking rather mournful was Naina Kievna, with a mesh bag full of blue packets of sugar. “They’ve brought him,” she repeated. “Every Friday they bring him . . .”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Why, to the firing range, dear guest. They’re always experimenting . . . They’ve got nothing better to do with their time.”
“But who is it they’ve brought, Naina Kievna?”
“What do you mean, who? You can see for yourself, can’t you?”
She turned and walked away, but I caught up with her. “Naina Kievna, there was a telephonogram for you.”
“Who’s it from?”
“C. M. Viy.”
“And what’s it about?”
“You’ve got some kind of rally today,” I said, looking at her intently. “On Bald Mountain. Dress code formal.”
The old woman was clearly delighted. “Really?” she said. “Goody-goody! Where’s the telephonogram?”
“On the phone in the hall.”
“Does it say anything about membership dues?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, outstanding dues owed must be paid as from seventeen hundred—” she stopped.
“No,” I said, “It didn’t say anything like that.”
“That’s all right, then. What about transport? Will they send a car or what?”
“Let me carry your bag for you,” I offered. The old woman started back.
“What for?” she asked suspiciously. “You just stop that—I don’t like it . . . Give him my bag! And him still so young; he must be an early starter . . .”
I don’t like old women, I thought.
“So, what about the transport?” she asked again.
“At your own expense,” I said with malicious delight.
“Agh, the misers!” the old woman groaned. “They took my broomstick and put it in a museum, they don’t repair the flying mortar, they try to rob me of five rubles’ membership dues, and say I’ve got to get to Bald Mountain at my own expense! That’s some expense, dear guest of mine, and while the taxi’s waiting . . .” Mumbling and coughing, she turned and walked away from me. I rubbed my hands together and also went on my way. My conjectures had been confirmed. The knot of remarkable events was being drawn ever tighter. I’m ashamed to admit it, but at that moment it seemed to me even more interesting than modeling a reflex arc.
Peace Prospect was by now almost deserted. There was a swarm of little kids scurrying about at the crossroads—I think they were playing tipcat. Catching sight of me, they abandoned their game and started moving in my direction. Sensing approaching hostility, I walked hurriedly past them and set off toward the center of town. I heard a muffled exclamation of delight behind me: “Dandy!” I started walking faster. “Dandy!” several voices immediately howled out together. I began almost running. Behind me they squealed, “Dandy! Skinny-legs! Fancy-pants!” Passersby were giving me looks of sympathy. In situations like this the best thing to do is to go to ground somewhere. I dived into the nearest shop, which turned out to be a grocery store, and walked along the counters, noting that they had sugar in stock and that the range of salami and sweets wasn’t very extensive but the choice of so-called fish products exceeded all possible expectations. What wonderful salmon they had! I drank a glass of sparkling water and glanced out into the street. The little boys were gone, so I went out of the shop and continued on my way. Soon the “emporiums” and log-built fortress-huts came to an end and their place was taken by the modern two-story apartment blocks with little open yards, where little infants toddled and crawled about, middle-aged women knitted something warm, and middle-aged men played dominoes.
In the center of the town I found a wide square surrounded by two-story and three-story buildings. The surface of the square was covered with asphalt, and in the middle of it there was a little green garden. Rising up out of the greenery was a large red board with the inscription BOARD OF HONOR, and several smaller boards with maps and diagrams. I found the post office on the square too. I had agreed with the guys that the first to arrive would leave a note saying where he was. There was no note for me, so I left a letter giving my address and explaining how to get to the Log Hut on Chicken Legs. Then I decided to have some breakfast.
Walking around the square I came across the following: a theater that was showing the film Kozara; a bookshop that was closed for inventory; the town council building, with several dusty jeeps standing in front of it; the Icebound Sea Hotel, which, as usual, had no rooms available; two kiosks selling sparkling water and ice cream; shop number 2 (industrial goods) and shop number 18 (household goods); cafeteria number 11, which opened at twelve o’clock, and buffet number 3, which was closed with no explanation offered. Then I discovered the town militia station, and in front of its open doors I had a conversation with a very youthful militiaman holding the rank of sergeant, who explained to me where the gas station was and which was the road to Lezhnev.
“And where’s your car?” the militiaman inquired, surveying the square.
“At my friends’ place,” I replied.
“Ah, at your friends’ place . . .” the militiaman said with emphasis. I believe he made a mental note of me. I timidly said good-bye, feeling nervous.
Beside the huge three-story bulk of the Solovets Fish Suppliers, Processors, and Consumers Trust (as I deciphered the sign SOLFISUPPROCONSUMTRUST) I eventually found the tidy little tearoom number 16/27. It was very pleasant inside. There weren’t many people and they really were drinking tea and speaking about things I could understand: how the bridge at Korobets had finally collapsed and now you had to ford the river; how it had been more than a week since the traffic police post on the fifteen-kilometer mark had been removed; how “it’s sparking fit to kill an elephant, but it just won’t turn over.” The place smelled of gasoline and fried fish. Those who were not engaged in conversation inspected my jeans in great detail, and I felt glad that they had a working-man’s stain at the back—fortunately I’d sat on a grease gun two days earlier.
I took a plate full of fried fish, three glasses of tea, and three sturgeon sandwiches, paid with a heap of the old woman’s copper coins (“Been standing begging at the church door . . .” the woman at the counter growled), made myself comfortable in a secluded corner, and tucked in, observing with pleasure these manly men with voices hoarse from smoking cigarettes. It was a pleasure to see how tanned, independent, and robust they were, how well they knew life, how they enjoyed eating their food, smoking, and talking. They were squeezing every last drop out of their break before the long hours jolting down a dull road in the stuffy heat of the cabin, the dust, and the sun. If I weren’t a programmer, I would have been a driver, and I wouldn’t have been working in some pitiful little automobile, or even on a bus, but on some great monster of a truck so big you’d need a ladder to climb up into the cabin and a small crane to change a wheel.
The two young men sitting at the next table didn’t look like truckers, so I paid no attention to them at first. And they paid no attention to me either. But just as I was finishing my second glass of tea, I heard the word “sofa.” And then one of them said, “In that case, it’s not clear why that Lohuchil exists at all . . .” and I started listening. Unfortunately they were talking softly and I was sitting with my back to them, so I couldn’t hear very much. But the voices sounded familiar: “No theses . . . just the sofa . . .”; “That hairy one?”; “The sofa . . . sixteenth degree . . .”; “For transgression no higher than the fourteenth degree . . .”; “Easier to model the translator . . .”; “Well, who doesn’t giggle at him!”; “I’ll give him a razor . . .”; “We can’t do it without the sofa . . .” Then one of them tried to clear his throat in such a familiar manner that I immediately remembered the night before and turned around, but they were already walking toward the door—two big young guys with massive shoulders and bodybuilders’ necks. I saw them through the window
for a while, too: they walked across the square, around the little garden, and disappeared behind the diagrams. I finished off my tea and my sandwich and went out. So they’re concerned about the sofa, I thought. They’re not bothered about the mermaid. They’re not interested in the talking cat. But it seems they can’t manage without the sofa . . . I tried to remember what the sofa in my room was like, but I couldn’t recall anything unusual. Just an ordinary sofa. A good sofa. Comfortable. Only the reality you dreamed about on it was rather strange.
It would be a good idea now to go back there and get a firm grip on all this sofa business. Try experimenting a bit with the whimsical book, have a frank word with Vasily the cat, and see whether there was anything else interesting to be found in the Log Hut on Chicken Legs. But my Moskvich was waiting for me back there, and I needed to carry out a DM and a TS. I could just about live with the idea of a DM—that was only daily maintenance, shaking out the floor mats and washing the car down with a pressurized hose, which if necessary could be replaced by a garden watering can or a bucket. But that TS . . . On a hot day any man who likes to keep himself neat and tidy shudders at the very thought of a TS, because a TS is a technical service, and a technical service involves me lying under the car with a grease gun in my hands, gradually transferring the contents of the gun to the grease nipples and my own facial features. It’s hot and stuffy under the car, and its bottom is crusted with a thick layer of dried-on mud . . . In other words, I didn’t really feel like going back.
4
Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!
—Edgar Allan Poe
I bought the day before yesterday’s Pravda, drank a glass of sparkling water, and settled down on a bench in the little garden, in the shade of the Board of Honor. It was eleven o’clock. I looked through the newspaper carefully. It took me seven minutes. Then I read an article about hydroponics, an exposé about bribe-takers in Kansk, and a long letter to the editor from the workers at a chemical plant. Maybe I should go to the movies, I thought. But I’d already seen Kozara—once in the theater and once on television. Then I decided to have another glass of water, folded up the newspaper, and stood up. I only had a five-kopeck piece left out of all the old woman’s coppers. I’ll drink it all away, I decided, downed a glass of sparkling water with syrup, received one kopeck change, and bought a box of matches with it at the next kiosk. Now there was absolutely nothing at all left for me to do in the center of town, so I just followed my nose—into the narrow street between shop number 2 and cafeteria number 11.
There was almost no one on the street. A big, dusty truck with a clattering trailer overtook me. The driver had his elbow and head stuck out of the window of his cab, drearily observing the cobbled road surface. The street ran downhill around a sharp turn to the right, and beside the pavement at the bend there was the cast-iron barrel of an old cannon sticking up out of the ground, its mouth choked with earth and cigarette butts. Soon after that the street ended at the sheer bank of the river. I sat on the steep edge, admiring the view, then crossed to the other side of the street and started making my way back.
I wonder where that truck went, I thought. There was no way down that steep bank. I started looking around for gateways along the street, and I came across a small but very strange building, squeezed in between two gloomy brick “emporiums.” The windows on the ground floor of the building were protected by iron bars and painted over halfway up with whitewash. There were no doors into the house at all. I noticed that straightaway because here the sign that is usually set beside the gates or over the entrance was hanging between two windows. It read NITWiT AS USSR. I backed away to the middle of the street: yes, two stories, each with ten windows, and not a single door. And adjoining emporiums on the left and the right. NITWiT of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, I thought. National Institute of TWiT, I suppose. And Lohuchil, the Log Hut on Chicken Legs, I thought, is this NITWiT’s museum. My traveling companions must be from here too. And those others in the tearoom . . . A flock of crows rose into the air from the roof of a building and circled, cawing, above the street. I turned and walked back toward the square.
We are all naive materialists, I thought. And we are all rationalists. We demand an immediate rational explanation for everything; we want everything reduced to a handful of known facts. And not one of us has even an ounce of dialectics. It never occurs to anybody that the known facts and some new phenomenon might be separated by an entire ocean of the unknown, so we declare the new phenomenon supernatural and, therefore, impossible. What kind of response, for instance, would Montesquieu have given to the statement that a dead man had revived forty-five minutes after his heart was known to have stopped? No doubt a hostile one. He would have declared it obscurantism and superstitious nonsense. That is, if he didn’t simply dismiss such a claim out of hand. But if it had happened in front of his very eyes, then he would have found himself in an extremely difficult situation. As I did now, only I was more used to it. He would have been obliged to regard the resurrection as a fraud, or to deny the evidence of his own senses, or even to abandon materialism. Most likely he would have chosen to regard the resurrection as a fraud. But for the rest of his life the memory of that cunning trick would have irritated his mind, like a mote in his eye . . .
We, however, are children of a different age. We’ve seen all sorts of things: a live dog’s head sewn to the back of another living dog, and an artificial kidney the size of a wardrobe, and a dead metal hand controlled by living nerves, and people who can remark casually in passing, “That was after I died the first time . . .” Yes, in our time Montesquieu’s chances of remaining a materialist wouldn’t have been too good. But we seem to manage it without too much bother.
It can be difficult at times, of course—when a chance breeze wafts the petals of mysterious plants across the ocean to us from the vast continents of the unknown. And what makes it difficult most often is when what you find is not what you were looking for. Soon the zoos and museums will be showing amazing animals, the first creatures from Mars or Venus. Yes, of course, we’ll gape at them and slap our thighs, but we’ve been expecting these animals for a long time already, and we’re well prepared for them to put in an appearance. We’d be far more amazed and disappointed if these animals proved not to exist at all, or to resemble our cats and dogs. As a rule, the science in which we believe (quite often blindly) prepares us long in advance for the miracles that lie ahead, and we only suffer psychological shock when we come up against the unforeseen, like some hole through into the fourth dimension, or biological radio communication, or a living planet . . . Or, say, a log hut on chicken legs . . . Volodya with the ginger beard was right when he said this was a funny old place they had here . . .
I reached the square and halted in front of the sparkling water kiosk. I remembered quite definitely that I had no change and I would have to break a note, and I was already preparing an ingratiating smile, because the kiosk women who sell sparkling water hate changing paper money, when I suddenly discovered a five-kopeck piece in the pocket of my jeans. I was amazed and delighted, but mostly delighted. I drank a glass of sparkling water with syrup, received a wet kopeck in change, and had a brief word with the kiosk attendant about the weather. Then I set off resolutely to walk home, to get the DM and TS over and done with as soon as possible and continue with my rational dialectical deliberations. As I stuck the kopeck in my pocket I stopped dead on discovering that there was another five-kopeck piece in there. I took it out and looked at it. The coin was slightly damp, and in the inscription “5 kopecks 1961” the “6” was obscured by a shallow dent. Perhaps even then I might not have paid any attention to this minor incident if it weren’t for the familiar, fleeting feeling that at one and the same time I was standing here on Peace Prospect and sitting on the sofa, gazing stupidly at that set of hooks. And this time, too, when I shook my head, the feeling disappe
ared.
I walked on slowly for a while, absentmindedly tossing the five-kopeck piece up in the air and catching it (it always fell on my palm tails up) and trying to concentrate. Then I saw the grocery store where I’d taken refuge from the crowd of kids that morning. Holding the coin between my finger and thumb, I went straight back to the counter where they sold fruit juices and water and drank a glass of water without syrup, and without enjoying it one little bit. Then, clutching the change in my fist, I walked off to one side and checked my pocket.
It was one of those cases when there is no psychological shock. I would have been more surprised if the five-kopeck piece hadn’t been there. But it was there—damp, dated 1961, with a dent over the digit “6.” Someone gave me a shove and asked if I was asleep. Apparently I was standing in the line for the cash desk. I said I wasn’t asleep and took a sales check for three boxes of matches. I was perfectly calm. After collecting my three boxes I went back out onto the square and began experimenting.
My experiment took about an hour. During that hour I made ten rounds of the square, until I was bloated with water and heavily burdened with boxes of matches and newspapers. I got to know all the salesmen and saleswomen and reached a number of interesting conclusions. The coin came back if it was used to pay. If you simply threw it away, dropped it, or lost it, then it would stay where it was. The coin returned to the pocket at the moment when the change passed from the seller’s hands into the hands of the buyer. If at that moment I held my hand in one pocket, the coin appeared in the other. It never appeared in a pocket that was closed with a zipper. If I kept both my hands in my pockets and took my change with my elbow, the coin could appear anywhere at all on my body (in one case it turned up in my shoe). The coin’s disappearance from the saucer of coppers was quite imperceptible; the five-kopeck piece immediately became invisible among the other copper coins and no movement occurred in the saucer at the moment when the five-kopeck piece moved back to my pocket.