How long it is since I squeezed out my guts.
But I used to squeeze them out so fine!
No one else could squeeze them out so far!
I squeezed them right out there for everyone,
I was the only one squeezing them out!
It was impossible to imagine a greater contrast with the quiet voice of Zoya Yashchenko, the female singer with The White Guard, than this extraordinary song. But there was something about it I liked. The singer ran through a three-chord bridge and continued with his lament:
Sometimes now I still squeeze them out,
But now it's not the way it used to be.
They just don't squeeze out the same way at all
I'll never squeeze them out again the way I used to . . .
I started laughing. It had all the distinctive features of Russian 'gangster' songs – a lyric hero recalling his former splendour, describing his present fallen state and lamenting that he will never recover the glory of former days.
And I had a strong suspicion that if this song were played on Radio Chanson, ninety per cent of the listeners wouldn't even suspect it was a send-up.
The guitar gave a few sighs. And then the voice launched into a new song:
I've never been in the loony bin,
So stop asking me about that . . .
The music broke off. I rummaged in the cardboard box, found a bottle of vodka and a stick of smoked salami. I skipped out onto the landing, pulled the door shut and set off up the stairs.
Finding the midnight bard's apartment was about as hard as finding a working pneumatic drill in the bushes.
The birds have stopped their singing,
The sun no longer shines
There are no vicious kids frolicking
Round the rubbish tip outside . . .
I rang the bell, certain that no one would hear it. But the music stopped, and about thirty seconds later the door opened.
Standing there in the doorway with an amiable smile on his face was a short, stocky man about thirty years old, holding a bass guitar. With a certain morose satisfaction, I observed that he had a 'bandit' haircut like me. The bard was wearing threadbare jeans and an amusing T-shirt – a paratrooper in Russian uniform slitting the throat of an American soldier with a huge knife. Below the picture was the defiant slogan 'Let us remind you who really won the Second World War!'
'That's not bad, either,' the guitarist said, looking at my T-shirt. 'Come on in.'
He took the vodka and the salami and moved back inside.
I took a look at him through the Twilight.
A human being.
And such a confused jumble of an aura that I decided there and then not to try to understand his character. Grey, pink, red and blue tones . . . a really impressive cocktail.
I followed him inside.
His apartment turned out to be twice as big as mine. Oho, he didn't earn the money for that by playing the guitar . . . But then, that was none of my business. What was really funny was that, apart from its size, the apartment looked like an exact copy of mine. The initial phase of a magnificent finishing job hastily wound up and left incomplete.
Standing in the middle of this monstrously huge living space – at least fifteen square metres – there was a chair, and in front of the chair a microphone on a stand, a good quality professional amplifier and two enormous speakers.
Over by the wall there were three immense Bosch fridges. The guitarist opened the biggest one – it was empty – and put the bottle of vodka in the freezer. He explained:
'It's warm.'
'I haven't got a fridge yet,' I said.
'It happens,' the bard sympathised. 'Las.'
'What do you mean, "las",' I asked, puzzled.
'That's my name, Las. Not the one in my passport.'
'Anton,' I said, introducing myself. 'That is the name in my passport.'
'It happens,' Las sympathised again. 'Come far?'
'I live on the eighth,' I explained.
Las scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. He looked at the open windows and explained:
'I opened them so it wouldn't be so loud. Otherwise my ears can't take it. I was going to put in soundproofing, but I ran out of money.'
'That seems to be a common problem,' I said cautiously. 'I haven't even got a toilet.'
Las smiled triumphantly.
'I have. I've had it for a week! That door over there.'
When I got back, Las was melancholically slicing the salami. Unable to resist, I asked him:
'Why is your toilet so huge and English-looking?'
'Did you see the company label on it?' Las asked me. '"We invented the first toilet". Just had to buy it, didn't I, with that written on it? I keep meaning to scan the label and change it a little bit, write: "We were the first to guess that people need . . ."'
'I get the idea,' I said. 'I do have a shower installed, though.'
'Really?' Las said, standing up. 'I've been dreaming about having a shower for three days . . .'
I held out my keys.
'Meanwhile you organise the hors d'oeuvres,' Las said happily. 'The vodka has to cool for another ten minutes anyway. And I'll be quick.'
The door slammed shut, and I was left in a stranger's apartment – alone with an amplifier that was switched on, a half-sliced stick of salami and three huge, empty fridges.
Well, how about that! I would never have expected the easygoing social relations of a friendly communal apartment – or a student hostel – to exist inside buildings like this.
You use my toilet, and I'll get washed in your jacuzzi . . . And Pyotr Petrovich has a fridge, and Ivan Ivanovich promised to bring some vodka – he trades in the stuff – and Semyon Semyon cuts the sausage for the snacks very neatly, with loving care . . .
Probably the majority of the people with apartments there had bought them 'for posterity'. Using every last bit of money they could earn – and beg, steal or borrow. And it was only afterwards that the happy owners had realised that an apartment that size also required major finishing work. And that any construction firm wouldn't think twice about ripping off someone who had bought a home here. And that they still had to pay every month for the massive grounds, the underground car parks, the embankments and the park.
So the huge building was standing there half-empty, very nearly deserted. Of course, it was no tragedy if someone was a bit short of cash. But for the first time I could see with my own eyes that it was at least a tragicomedy.
How many people really lived in the Assol complex? Was I the only one who had noticed the bass guitar in the middle of the night and before that had the strange musician made his racket entirely unchallenged?
One person on each floor? It was probably even less than that . . .
But then who had sent the letter?
I tried to imagine Las cutting letters out of Pravda with nail scissors. I couldn't. Someone like him would have come up with something a bit more imaginative.
I closed my eyes, picturing the grey shadow of my eyelids falling across my pupils. Then I opened my eyes and looked round the apartment through the Twilight.
Not the slightest trace of any magic. Not even on the guitar, although a good instrument that has been in the hands of an Other or a potential Other remembers that touch for years.
And there was no trace anywhere of blue moss, that parasite of the Twilight that feasts on negative emotions. If the owner of the apartment ever fell into a depression, then he didn't do it here. Or else he had such a genuinely good time that it burned away all the blue moss.
I sat down and started carving the rest of the salami. To be on the safe side, I checked through the Twilight to see if it was really a good idea to eat it.
The salami turned out to be all right. Gesar didn't want his agent to go down with food poisoning.
'Now that's the right temperature,' said Las, removing the wine thermometer from the open bottle. 'We didn't leave it in for too long. Some people cool vo
dka to the consistency of glycerine, so that drinking it's like swallowing liquid nitrogen. Here's to our meeting!'
We drank a glass and followed it with salami and crispbreads, which Las had brought from my apartment – he explained that he hadn't bothered to get any food in that day.
'The entire building lives like this,' he explained. 'Well, of course there are some people who had enough money to finish their places and furnish them as well. Only just imagine how wonderful it is living in an empty building. There they are, waiting for the petty riff-raff like you and me to finish our places off and move in. The cafés aren't working, the casino's empty, the security men are freaking out from sheer boredom . . . two of them were sacked yesterday – they started shooting at the bushes in the yard. Said they'd seen something horrible. They probably did too – they were as high as kites.'
And so saying, Las took a pack of Belomor cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and gave me a cunning look:
'Want one?'
I hadn't been expecting a man who poured vodka in such good style to fool around with marijuana.
I shook my head and asked:
'Do you smoke many?'
'This is the second pack today,' Las sighed. And then he suddenly realised. 'Hey, come on, Anton! These are Belomor! Not dope! I used to smoke Gitânes before, until I realised they were no different from our very own Belomor.'
'Original,' I said.
'What's that got to do with anything?' Las said, offended. 'I'm not trying to be original. You only have to be a bit different, not like the rest, and straight away they say you're putting on airs. But I like smoking Belomor. If I lose interest a week from now, I'll give up.'
'There's nothing wrong with being different,' I said, putting out a feeler.
'But really being different is hard,' Las replied. 'Just a couple of days ago I had this idea . . .'
I pricked my ears up again. The letter had been sent two days earlier. Could everything really have come together so neatly?
'I was in this hospital, and while I was waiting to be seen, I read all the price lists,' Las went on, not suspecting a trap. 'And what they do there is serious stuff, they make artificial body parts out of titanium to replace what people have lost. Shinbones, knee joints and hip joints, jawbones . . . Patches for the skull, teeth and other small bits and pieces . . . I got my calculator out and figured out how much it would cost to have all your bones totally replaced. It came out at about one million seven hundred thousand bucks. But I reckon on a bulk order like that you could get a good discount. Twenty to thirty per cent. And if you could convince the doctors it was good publicity, you could probably get away with half a million!'
'What for?' I asked. Thanks to my hairdresser, my hair wasn't able to stand up on end.
'It's just a fascinating idea,' Las explained. 'Imagine you want to hammer in a nail. You just raise your fist and smash it down, and the nail sinks into concrete. Those bones are titanium. Or say someone tries to punch you . . . nah, of course, there are drawbacks. And artificial organs aren't coming on too well yet. But the general trend of progress looks good to me.'
He poured us another glass.
'It seems to me the trend of progress is in a different direction,' I went on, sticking to my guns. 'We need to make greater use of the potential abilities of our organisms. All those amazing things that lie hidden inside us. Telekinesis, telepathy . . .'
Las looked a bit put out by that. I was getting depressed too, trying to play the idiot.
'Can you read my thoughts?' he asked.
'Not right now,' I confessed.
'I don't think we ought to invent any extra dimensions of reality,' Las explained. 'We've already known for a long time what man is capable of. If people could read thoughts, levitate and do all that other nonsense, there'd be some proof.'
'If someone suddenly acquired abilities like that, they'd hide them from everybody else,' I said, and took a look at Las through the Twilight. 'A really different, Other kind of being would provoke the envy and fear of people around him.'
Las didn't betray the slightest sign of excitement. Just scepticism.
'Well, surely this miracle worker would want to give the woman he loves and his children the same kind of abilities? They'd gradually take over from us as a biological species.'
'But what if the special abilities couldn't be inherited?' I asked. 'Or they weren't necessarily inherited? And you couldn't transmit them to anyone else either? Then you'd have the normal people and these Others existing independently. And if there weren't many of the Others, then they'd hide their abilities from everybody else . . .'
'Seems to me like you're talking about a random mutation that produces extrasensory abilities,' Las said, thinking out loud. 'Only if that mutation is random and recessive, it's absolutely no use to us. But you can actually have titanium bones installed right now!'
'Not a good idea,' I muttered.
We both had a drink.
'You know, this is a pretty weird situation we're in here,' Las mused. 'A huge empty building, hundreds of apartments – and only nine people living in them . . . that's if we include you. The things you could get up to. It takes your breath away. And what a video you could shoot! Just imagine it – the luxurious interiors, empty restaurants, dead laundries, rusting exercise machines and cold saunas, empty swimming pools and casino tables wrapped in plastic sheeting. And a young girl wandering through it all. Wandering around and singing. It doesn't even matter what.'
'Do you shoot videos?' I asked cautiously.
'Nah . . .' Las frowned. 'Well . . . just the once I helped this punk band I know shoot one. They showed it on MTV, but then it was banned.'
'What was so terrible about it?'
'Nothing really,' said Las. 'It was just a song, nothing offensive about it, in fact it was about love. The visuals were unusual. We shot them in a hospital for patients with motor function disorders. We set up strobe lights in a hall, put on the song "Captain, captain, why have you left the horse?" and invited the patients to dance. So they danced to the strobes. Or they tried to. And then we laid the new sound sequence over the visuals. The result was really stylish. But you really can't show it. It has a bad feel somehow.'
I imagined the visuals and squirmed.
'I'm no good as a video producer,' Las admitted. 'Or as a musician . . . they played a song of mine on the radio once, in the middle of the night, in a programme for all sorts of hardcore weirdos. And what do you think happened? This well-known songwriter immediately called the radio station and said all his life in his songs he'd been teaching people about good, and about eternal values, but this had cancelled out his entire life's work . . . You heard one of my songs, I think – did you think it was encouraging people to do bad things?'
'I think it made fun of bad attitudes,' I said.
'Thank you,' Las said sadly. 'But that's exactly the problem – there are too many people who won't understand that. They'll think it's all for real.'
'That's what the fools will think,' I said, trying to console the unacknowledged bard.
'But there are more of them,' Las exclaimed. 'And they haven't perfected head replacements yet . . .'
He reached for the bottle, poured the vodka and said:
'You drop in any time you need to, don't be shy. And later I'll get you a key for an apartment on the fifteenth floor. It's empty, but it has toilets.'