“Shut your mouth, you yellow asshole!” Cvirik suddenly howled out savagely, reaching for his holster.
Andrei swayed forward to stand between them, but at that moment someone shoved him hard on the shoulder, and Selma was suddenly standing in front of Cvirik.
“How dare you swear like that in the presence of women, you bastard!” she yelled. “You fat-assed scumbag! You ugly thug!”
Andrei was completely dazed. Cvirik and Kensi and Selma all screamed hideously at the same time. Out of the corner of his eye, Andrei noticed the characters in the doorway glancing uncertainly at each other and moving to hold their carbines at the ready, and Denny Lee suddenly appeared beside them, holding a heavy editor’s stool with a metal seat by one leg, but the most frightening and unbelievable sight of all was the little floozy Amalia, hunched over in a strange, predatory pose and baring long, white teeth that looked spine-chilling on her haggard, corpse-like face, stealthily creeping toward Cvirik, raising the smoking poker over her right shoulder, as if it were a golf club . . .
“I remember you, you son of a bitch!” Kensi shouted furiously. “You embezzled the money for schools, you sleazeball, and now you’ve risen to be a coadjutor!”
“I’ll trample you all into shit! I’ll make you eat shit! You enemies of mankind!”
“Shut it, you piece of scum. Shut it, while you’re still in one piece!”
“No sharp movements! I implore you!”
Like a man under a spell, Andrei followed the movement of the smoking poker, unable to stir a muscle. He could sense, he knew, that something terrible and irrevocable was about to happen, and it was already too late to prevent this terrible thing.
“We’ll string you up on a streetlamp!” the junior adjutor howled wildly, waving a huge automatic pistol around in the air. In all this hubbub and uproar he had somehow managed to pull out his pistol, and now he was brandishing it mindlessly and yelling continuously in his piercing voice, and then Kensi bounded up to him, and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, and Cvirik started pushing him off with both hands, and suddenly a shot rang out, followed immediately by a second and a third. The poker flashed through the air without a sound, and everyone froze.
Cvirik was standing alone in the center of the office, with his crimson face rapidly turning gray. He was rubbing the shoulder bruised by the poker with one hand, and his other hand was shaking, still held out in front of him. The pistol was lying on the floor. The characters in the doorway stood there with their mouths all hanging open in the same way and their carbines lowered.
“I didn’t mean to . . .” Cvirik said in a trembling voice.
The stool fell out of Denny’s hand and crashed heavily against the floor, and that was when Andrei realized where everyone was looking. They were all looking at Kensi, who was tumbling backward with a strange, extremely slow movement, pressing both hands to the lower part of his chest.
“I didn’t mean to . . .” Cvirik repeated in a tearful voice. “As God’s my witness, I didn’t mean to!”
Kensi’s legs buckled and he collapsed gently, almost without a sound, into the heap of ash beside the fireplace, uttering an inarticulate, painful sound as he strained to pull his knees up to his stomach.
And then, with a terrible shriek, Selma sank her nails into Cvirik’s fat, gleaming, dirty-white face, and everyone else went dashing to the man lying on the floor, tramping loudly, and screened him off, piling up over him, and then Izya straightened up, turned to look at Andrei with his face strangely contorted and his eyebrows raised in astonishment, and mumbled, “He’s dead. They killed him . . .”
The telephone rang thunderously. Not understanding a thing, Andrei held out his hand as if this were a dream and picked up the receiver.
“Andrei? Andrei!” It was Otto Friese. “Are you alive and well? Thank God, I was so worried about you! Well, everything will be fine now. Fritz will look out for us now if need be . . .” He said something else—about sausage, about butter. Andrei wasn’t listening to him any longer.
Selma was squatting down on her haunches with her arms wrapped around her head and weeping uncontrollably, and Junior Adjutor Raymond Cvirik was smearing the blood from the deep, oozing scratches across his gray cheeks and repeating over and over again, like a broken piece of clockwork, “I didn’t mean to . . . I swear to God, I didn’t mean to . . .”
PART IV
1
The water flowed out lukewarm and tasted vile. The showerhead was set unnaturally high, beyond his reach, and the feeble jets watered absolutely everything except what they were meant to. The drain was blocked, as usual, and the water above the grating sloshed about under his feet. And anyway, it was outrageous that he’d had to wait. Andrei listened: they were still droning and jabbering in the locker room. He thought he heard his name mentioned. Andrei twisted around and started squirming with his back, trying to catch the flow on his spine—he slipped, grabbed hold of the rough concrete wall, and swore under his breath. Damn them all to hell, why didn’t they realize they ought to build a separate shower for government employees? I hate hanging around here like some kind of bad smell . . .
On the door in front of his nose someone had scratched, LOOK RIGHT. Andrei automatically looked to the right, where someone had scratched, LOOK BACK. Andrei got the idea. OK, we know the deal, we learned that in school, we used to write the same stuff ourselves . . . He shut off the water. It was quiet in the locker room. He cautiously opened the door and glanced out. Thank God, they’d gone . . .
He walked out, squeamishly turning up his toes as he hobbled across the dirty tiles toward his clothes. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted some kind of movement over by the wall. Peering in that direction, he discovered a pair of skinny buttocks, overgrown with black wool. So that was it, the usual picture: a naked man kneeling on the bench, staring into the women’s locker room through a chink in the corner. Frozen absolutely still in his intent concentration.
Andrei took a towel and started wiping himself down. The towel was a cheap one, government issue, impregnated with the smell of carbolic, and it didn’t really absorb the water but just smeared it across his skin.
The naked man was still ogling. His pose was unnatural, like a hanged man’s—the hole in the wall had evidently been made by a teenager, in a low, inconvenient spot. And then the moment must have come when there was nothing left for the man to watch, because he sighed loudly and sat down, lowering his feet onto the floor. And then he saw Andrei.
“She got dressed,” he announced. “A beautiful woman.”
Andrei didn’t say anything.
“I burst a blister again—there you go . . .” the naked man declared, examining the palm of his hand. “Yet again.” He unfolded a towel and examined it suspiciously on both sides. “I’ll tell you what I don’t understand,” he went on, toweling his head. “Why the hell couldn’t they send some excavators over here? All of us could be replaced by a single excavator, couldn’t we? And here we are scrabbling away with spades, like . . .”
Andrei shrugged and mumbled something that he didn’t even understand himself.
“Ah?” asked the naked man, freeing his ear from under the towel.
“I said, there are only two excavators in the City,” Andrei growled irritably. The lace on his right shoe had snapped, and now it was impossible to escape a conversation.
“That’s what I’m saying—they should send one over here!” the naked man protested, energetically scrubbing at one side of his hairy pigeon chest. “But with spades . . . Let me tell you, you have to know how to work with a spade, and how, I ask you, are we supposed to know that, if we’re from City Planning?”
“The excavators are needed somewhere else,” Andrei growled. The damned shoelace just wouldn’t tie.
“Where else is that?” asked the naked man from City Planning, pouncing immediately. “If I understand right, this here is the Great Construction Project. So where are the excavators? Gone to the Greatest Construction Projec
t, have they? I haven’t heard about that one.”
Why the hell do I have to argue with you? Andrei thought balefully. And why am I arguing with him anyway? I ought to agree with him, not argue. If I’d backed him up a couple of times, he’d have left me in peace . . . No, he wouldn’t have left me in peace anyway, he’d have started talking about naked women—how good it is for his health to ogle them. Obsessive-delusional creep. “What are you beefing about, anyway?” he said, straightening up. “They only ask you to work one hour a day, but you’re whining like they were screwing a pencil up your ass . . . So he burst a blister! An industrial injury . . .”
Stunned, the naked man from City Planning stared at Andrei with his mouth half open. Skinny and hairy, with gouty little knees and a crooked little belly . . .
“You’re all working for your own sake, after all!” Andrei continued, furiously knotting his necktie. “They’re asking you to work for yourselves, not for someone else’s uncle! But no, they’re still dissatisfied, nothing’s right for them. Before the Turning Point he probably carted shit, but now he works in City Planning, and he’s still whining . . .”
He put on his jacket and started rolling up his overalls. And at that point the man from City Planning finally spoke up. “I beg your pardon!” he exclaimed resentfully. “I didn’t mean anything of the kind. I was only thinking of rationality, efficiency . . . You surprise me! If you’d like to know, I stormed City Hall in person! And I tell you that if this is the Great Construction Site, then the very best of everything ought to be sent here . . . and don’t you take the liberty of shouting at me!”
“Aah, it’s pointless trying to talk to you . . .” Andrei said, and walked out of the locker room, wrapping his overalls in newspaper as he went.
Selma was already waiting for him, sitting on a bench a short distance away. She was smoking pensively, looking in the direction of the foundation pit, with her legs crossed in her usual manner, fresh and pink after her shower. Andrei felt an unpleasant twinge—it could very easily have been her that the hairy little bastard was ogling and drooling over. He walked across, stopped beside her, and laid his palm on her cool neck. “Shall we go?”
She looked up at him, smiled, and rubbed her cheek against his hand. “Let’s just have a cigarette,” she suggested.
“Right,” he agreed, sitting down beside her and lighting up too.
In the foundation pit hundreds of people shuffled about, earth flew off spades, the sun flashed on polished iron. A line of drays loaded with dirt was moving across the opposite slope, and the next shift was gathering by the stacks of concrete slabs. The wind swirled around the reddish dust, carrying fragments of marches from the loudspeakers installed on concrete columns to their ears, and swaying immense sheets of plywood bearing faded slogans: “Heiger said: We must! The City replied: We shall!”; “The Great Construction Site is a blow struck at the nonhumans!”; “The Experiment—on the Experimenters!”
“Otto promised the rugs would come today,” said Selma.
“That’s good,” Andrei answered delightedly. “Take the biggest one there is. We’ll put it on the floor in the parlor.”
“I was going to put it in your study. On the wall. Remember, I said so last year, when we’d only just moved in?”
“In the study?” Andrei said thoughtfully. He imagined his study, the rug, and his guns. It looked great. “Good idea,” he said. “Right. Let’s put it in the study.”
“Only you have to call Ruhmer,” said Selma. “Get him to send a man.”
“You call him,” said Andrei. “I won’t have time . . . But then . . . OK, I’ll call. Where shall I get him to send the man? Our place?”
“No, straight to the depot. Will you be back for lunch?”
“Yes, probably. By the way, Izya’s been asking for a long time if he can come by.”
“Well, that’s great! Invite him this evening. It’s ages since we got together. And we should invite Wang, with Mei-lin . . .”
“Uh-huh . . . mmm . . .” said Andrei. Somehow he hadn’t thought of inviting Wang. “Apart from Izya, are you thinking of inviting anyone else from our crowd?” he asked cautiously.
“Our crowd? We could ask the colonel . . .” Selma said uncertainly. “He’s a really nice man . . . But anyway, if we do invite anyone from our crowd today, the Dolfusses should be first in line. We’ve been to their place twice already, it’s awkward.”
“If only it could be without his wife,” said Andrei.
“We can’t possibly invite him without his wife.”
“You know what,” said Andrei, “don’t call them yet, and we’ll see how things look this evening.” It was absolutely clear to him that there was no way Wang and the Dolfusses fitted together. “Maybe we ought to invite Chachua instead?”
“Brilliant,” said Selma. “We’ll set him on Madam Dolfuss. And everyone will have a good time.” She dropped her cigarette butt. “Shall we go?”
Raising dust, yet another crowd of Great Builders made its way from the foundation pit toward the shower block—sweaty, loud-voiced, chortling workers from the foundry.
“Yes, let’s,” said Andrei.
Following a grubby little sandy lane between two rows of puny, freshly planted lime trees, they came out at a bus stop, where two battered and peeling buses were still standing, absolutely packed. Andrei looked at his watch: there were seven minutes until the buses left. Red-faced women were pushing a drunk out of the first bus. The drunk was hollering in a hoarse voice, and the women were hollering too, in high, hysterical voices.
“Shall we ride with the louts or walk?” Andrei asked.
“Do you have time?”
“Yes. Let’s go. We’ll walk along the Cliff. It’s a bit cooler there.”
Selma took him by the arm and they turned left into the shade of a five-story building covered in scaffolding, then set off along a small, cobblestoned street toward the Cliff.
This was a desolate, abandoned district. The empty, shabby little houses stood at crooked angles; the roads were overgrown with grass. Before the Turning Point and immediately afterward, it wasn’t really safe to show your face here during the day, let alone at night—the whole area was full of thieves’ hangouts, shady dives, and dens of iniquity. It had been populated by moonshiners, fences handling stolen goods, professional gold hunters, prostitutes who fingered victims for muggers, and other lowlifes. And then measures had been taken: some of them were caught and sent to settlements in the swamps, to work as farm laborers; others—the petty riffraff—were simply scattered to the four winds. In the hurly-burly some of them were put up against the wall, and everything of value that was found here was requisitioned for the City. The city blocks were left deserted. At first, patrols still used to come in here, then they were canceled as unnecessary, and just recently it had been announced that the slums were due for demolition and would be replaced by a belt of recreational land running along the entire cliff edge within the city limits—a promenade and amusement park.
Selma and Andrei rounded the final tumbledown ruin and set off along the cliff top, walking up to their knees in tall, luscious grass. It was cool here—damp, cold air billowed up out of the Abyss. Selma sneezed, and Andrei put his arm around her shoulders.
The granite parapet didn’t extend as far as this stretch yet, and Andrei instinctively tried to keep a good distance away from the cliff edge—five or six steps.
Everyone felt strange on the cliff top. And apparently everyone got the same feeling here—that the world, if you looked at it from this spot, was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west, there was a boundless, blue-green void—not sea, and not even sky, but precisely a void of a bluish-greenish color. Blue-green Nothing. To the east, towering up vertically and blotting out the sky, was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow, with a narrow protruding terrace, along which the City stretched. The Yellow Wall. A solid, yellow Firmament.
Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the
east. It was absolutely impossible to comprehend these two infinities. You could only grow accustomed to them. Those who couldn’t grow accustomed to them, who simply didn’t know how, tried not to come to the Cliff, so it was a rare thing to meet anyone here. Nowadays lovebirds were pretty much the only ones who came out here, and mostly at night. At night something in the Abyss glowed with a weak, greenish light, as if down there in the depths something was slowly rotting, century by century. This glow gave the black, ragged cliff edge a clearly defined outline, and everywhere here the grass was incredibly tall and soft . . .
“And when we build the airships,” Selma suddenly said, “what will we do then, go up into the air in them or go down into this Abyss?”
“What airships?” Andrei asked absentmindedly.
“You know, the airships!” Selma exclaimed in surprise, and Andrei realized what she meant.
“Ah, the airships!” he said. “Down. Down, of course. Into the Abyss.”
It was believed among the majority of the citizens working their daily hour at the Great Construction Site that a gigantic airship factory was being built. Heiger thought it best to encourage this opinion in every way that he could—without, however, specifically confirming anything.
“But why down?” Selma asked.
“Well, you see . . . We’ve tried sending up balloons—unmanned, of course. Something happens to them up there; they explode for some reason we don’t understand. So far not one has gone higher than a kilometer.”
“But what can there be down there? What do you think?”
Andrei shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Ah, you great scientist! Mr. Counselor.” Selma picked up a fragment of an old wooden board with a rusty nail in it out of the grass and tossed it into the Abyss. “To give someone down there a smack on the noggin,” she said.