Hard to Be a God

by Arkady Strugatsky

  “It isn’t everyone who gets sent to the tower nowadays,” the giant rasped out amiably behind him. “We do things quick nowadays. A knot by the ear—and off you go.”

  The cub giggled again. Rumata glanced at him blindly, and slowly crossed the street. The sad poet’s face was black and unrecognizable. Rumata looked down. Only the hands were recognizable, with their long, weak fingers, stained with ink.

  Nowadays we don’t pass away,

  We’re led away into darkness.

  And even if anyone dares to

  Wish that it were otherwise,

  Powerless and incompetent,

  He lowers his weak hands,

  Not knowing where the dragon’s heart is.

  And whether the dragon has one.

  Rumata turned around and walked away. My good, weak Hauk … The dragon does have a heart. And we know where it is. And that’s the most frightening thing, my quiet, helpless friend. We know where it is, but we can’t destroy it without spilling the blood of thousands of frightened, hypnotized, blind people who know no doubts. And there are so many of them, hopelessly many—ignorant, isolated, embittered by perpetual thankless labor, downtrodden, not yet able to rise above the thought of an extra penny. And they cannot yet be taught, united, guided, saved from themselves. Far too early, centuries earlier than it should have, the gray muck has risen in Arkanar. It won’t meet with resistance, and all that’s left is to save those few there is still time to save. Budach, Tarra, Nanin, maybe another dozen, maybe another two dozen.

  But the very thought that thousands of others—maybe less talented but also honest and truly noble people—were fatally doomed caused an icy chill in his chest and an awareness of his own vileness. Sometimes this awareness became so acute that his mind would become clouded, and Rumata could almost see the backs of the gray bastards illuminated by lilac flashes of gunfire, and Don Reba’s eternally insignificant, pale visage contorted with animal terror, and the Merry Tower collapsing on itself. Yes, that’d be sweet. That would be actual work. An actual macroscopic impact. But then … Yes, they were right at the Institute. Then the inevitable. Bloody chaos in the country. The surfacing of Waga’s night army, ten thousand thugs excommunicated by every church—rapists, murderers, and sadists; hordes of copper-skinned barbarians descending from the mountains and destroying everything that moves, from newborns to the aged; huge crowds of peasants and townspeople, blind with terror, fleeing to the forests, mountains, and deserts; and your supporters—merry men, brave men!—ripping open each other’s bellies in a brutal struggle for power and for the right to control the machine gun after your inevitable violent death. And this absurd death—from a cup of wine served by your best friend, or from a crossbow bolt whistling toward your back from behind a curtain. And the horrified face of the one who will be sent from Earth to replace you, and who will find a country depopulated, drenched in blood, still burning, in which everything, everything, everything will need to be started over again.

  When Rumata kicked open the door of his house and entered the magnificent, dilapidated entrance hall, he was as gloomy as a storm cloud. Muga, the gray-haired, hunched servant of forty years’ experience, cowered at the sight of him and only watched, drawing his head further into his shoulders, as his savage young master tore off his hat, coat, and gloves, hurled his swords onto the bench, and climbed to his chambers. Uno waited for him in the living room.

  “Order dinner,” growled Rumata. “To my study.”

  “Someone’s waiting for my master in there,” Uno reported gloomily.

  “Who?”

  “Some common girl. Or maybe a doña. She speaks like a commoner—so gentle, but she’s dressed like a noblewoman … pretty.”

  Kira, thought Rumata with tenderness and relief. Oh, how wonderful! As if she sensed it, my little one. He stood still, his eyes closed, gathering his thoughts.

  “Should I turn her out?” the boy asked briskly.

  “You dummy,” said Rumata. “Don’t you dare! Where is she?”

  “In master’s study, of course,” the boy said with an inept smile.

  Rumata hurriedly headed there. “Order dinner for two,” he instructed along the way. “And listen: don’t let anyone in! Not the king, not the devil, not Don Reba himself.”

  She was in his study, sitting with her feet up on a chair, her chin propped up on her fist, absentmindedly flipping through the Treatise on Rumors. When Rumata walked in, she started, but he didn’t let her get up. He ran up to her, hugged her, and stuck his nose into her thick, fragrant tresses, muttering, “It’s so good to see you, Kira! It’s so good to see you.”

  There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was just a girl, eighteen years of age, snub-nosed, her father an assistant to the court clerk, her brother a sergeant in the storm troopers. And she was late getting married, because she was a redhead, and Arkanar didn’t think much of redheads. For that same reason, she was surprisingly quiet and shy, and she had nothing in common with the loudmouthed, voluptuous women who were so appreciated in every class of this society. Nor was she like the languid court beauties, who found out a woman’s lot too early and for life. But she knew how to love the way they now loved on Earth—calmly and unconditionally.

  “Why were you crying?” Rumata asked.

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “No, tell me why you were crying.”

  “I’ll tell you later. Your eyes are so very tired. What happened?”

  “Later. Who upset you?”

  “No one upset me,” Kira said. “Can you take me away from here?”

  “Definitely.”

  “When are we leaving?”

  “I don’t know, little one. But we’re definitely going to leave.”

  “Far away?”

  “Very far away.”

  “To the metropole?” she asked.

  “Yes … to the metropole. To my country.”

  “Is it nice there?”

  “It’s wondrously nice. No one ever cries there.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Of course,” Rumata admitted. “But you’ll never cry there.”

  “And what are the people there like?”

  “Like me”.

  “All of them?”

  “Not all of them. Some are much better.”

  “That’s definitely impossible.”

  “That’s not only possible,” he replied, “it’s true!”

  “Why is it so easy to believe you? My father doesn’t believe anyone. My brother says that all people are swine, the only difference is that some are filthy and others are not. But I don’t believe them, and you I always believe.”

  “I love you.”

  “Wait … Rumata. Take your circlet off. You said it’s a sin …”

  Rumata laughed happily, pulled the circlet off, put it on the table, and covered it with a book. “It’s the eye of God,” he said. “Let it be closed.” He lifted her up in his arms. “It’s very sinful, but when I’m with you, I don’t need God. Right?”

  “Right,” she said very softly.

  By the time they sat down to eat, the roast meat was cold, and the wine, which had been taken out of the icebox, was warm. Uno came by and, treading softly as he had been taught by old Muga, walked along the wall lighting lamps, though it was still light out.

  “This is your servant?” Kira asked.

  “No, he’s a free boy. A fine boy, only very stingy.”

  “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” Uno observed without turning around.

  “So you still haven’t bought new sheets?” asked Rumata.

  “What for?” the boy asked. “The old ones will do.”

  “Listen, Uno,” Rumata said. “I can’t sleep an entire month on the same sheets.”

  “Ha,” the boy said. “His Majesty does it for half a year without a murmur.”

  “And the oil,” Rumata said, winking at Kira. “The oil in the lamps. What is it, free?”

  Uno stopped. “
But my master has a guest,” he finally said firmly.

  “See how he is!” said Rumata.

  “He’s nice,” Kira said seriously. “He loves you. Let’s take him with us.”

  “We’ll see,” Rumata said.

  The boy asked suspiciously, “Take me where? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “We’ll go,” Kira said, “where all the people are like Don Rumata.”

  The boy thought for a moment and said scornfully, “What, heaven for the highborn?” Then he snorted derisively and shuffled out of the study, dragging feet in battered shoes.

  “A good boy,” she said. “Grumpy like a bear cub. He’s a nice friend.”

  “All my friends are nice.”

  “What about Baron Pampa?”

  “How do you know about him?” Rumata asked in surprise.

  “You never talk about anyone else. That’s all I ever hear about—Baron Pampa this and Baron Pampa that.”

  “Baron Pampa is a very good friend.”

  “How can a baron be a good friend?”

  “I mean that he’s a very good man. Very kind and merry. And very much in love with his wife.”

  “I’d like to meet him. Or are you ashamed of me?”

  “No, I’m not ashamed. It’s just that he’s a good man, but he’s still a baron.”

  “Oh …” she said.

  Rumata pushed his plate away. “Do tell me why you were crying. And why you came here alone. Is this the time to be running around the streets alone?”

  “I couldn’t manage at home. I’ll never go home. Can I be a servant here? For free.”

  Rumata chuckled through the lump in his throat.

  “Father copies confessions every day,” she continued with quiet desperation. “And the paper they are written on is all covered in blood. He gets them at the Merry Tower. Oh, why did you ever teach me to read? Every evening, every evening … copying transcripts of tortures—and drinking. So awful, so awful! ‘You know,’ he says, ‘Kira, our neighbor the calligrapher taught people to write. Who do you think he is? He revealed during torture that he’s a wizard and Irukanian spy. Who,’ he says, ‘am I supposed to believe now? I learned to write from him myself,’ he says. And my brother comes home from the patrol more drunk than beer itself, hands covered in dried blood. ‘We’ll kill them all,’ he says, ‘until the twelfth generation.’ He interrogates father about why he’s literate … Today, he and his buddies dragged some man into the house. They beat him up, splattered everything with blood. He even stopped screaming. I can’t live like this, I’d rather you kill me than go back!”

  Rumata stood beside her, stroking her hair. She was staring fixedly into space with tearless, gleaming eyes. What could he say to her? He lifted her in his arms, carried her to the sofa, sat down beside her, and started telling her about the temples made of crystal, about the cheerful gardens that stretched for many miles without any mosquitoes, rot, or evil spirits, about enchanted tablecloths, about flying carpets, about the magical city of Leningrad, about his friends—proud, cheerful, and happy people, about the wondrous country over the seas and mountains with the strange name Earth … She listened quietly and attentively, clinging tighter to him when hobnailed boots—thump, thump, thump—stomped on the pavement beneath their windows.

  She had an amazing quality—an utter and selfless belief in good. Tell such a tale to a serf—he’d grunt doubtfully, wipe off the snot with his sleeve, and keep going without saying a word, only looking back at the kind, sober, but—ah, what a pity!—crazy noble don. Start telling this to Don Tameo and Don Sera—they wouldn’t let you finish: one would fall asleep, and the other would burp and say, “That’s all reeeal noble, but how are their women?” And Don Reba would listen attentively until you were done, and having heard you out, would wink at his storm troopers, so they could bend the noble don’s elbows to his shoulder blades and find out where exactly the noble don heard such dangerous tales and who he’d had the time to tell them to.

  When Kira calmed down and fell asleep, he kissed her peaceful sleeping face, covered her with a fur-trimmed winter coat, and tiptoed out, closing the unpleasantly squeaking door behind him. After walking through the dark house, he went down to the servants’ quarters and said, looking above the bowed heads, “I hired a housekeeper. Her name is Kira. She will stay upstairs, with me. The room behind the study should be thoroughly tidied by tomorrow. Listen to the housekeeper like you do to me.” He scanned around the room: any mocking grins? No one was grinning; everyone was listening with proper deference. “And if anyone talks outside the gates, I’ll rip their tongue out!”

  After finishing the speech, he stood there for some time for emphasis, then turned around and went back up to his chambers. In the living room, which was hung with rusty weapons and cluttered with odd, bug-eaten furniture, he stood by the window and looked outside, leaning his forehead against the cold, dark glass. The bells chimed for the first night watch. In the windows across the way, people were lighting lamps and closing the shutters, in order not to attract evil men or evil spirits. It was quiet, except that at one point a drunk shouted in a terrible voice below—either someone was undressing him or he was trying to barge into the wrong door.

  These evenings were the worst—tedious, lonely, cheerless. We thought that it’d be an endless battle, fierce and victorious. We thought that we’d always have clear ideas about good and evil, about our friends and foes. And on the whole we were right, except there was a lot we didn’t take into account. For example, we couldn’t have imagined these evenings, although we knew they’d exist …

  There was a clatter of iron below—the doors were being bolted for the night. The cook was praying to Holy Míca to send her any husband at all, as long as he was independent and with a head on his shoulders. Old Muga was yawning, making circular motions with his thumb. In the kitchen, servants were finishing the evening’s beer and gossiping, while Uno, unfriendly eyes flashing, spoke like a grown-up: “Hold your tongues, tomcats.”

  Rumata stepped back from the window and walked around the living room. It’s hopeless, he thought. There’s no force strong enough to drag them out of their usual range of cares and ideas. You could give them everything. You could put them in the most modern spectroacoustic housing and teach them ionic procedures, and they’d still gather in the kitchen in the evening, playing cards and cackling about the neighbor whose wife wallops him. And there isn’t a better way for them to spend their time. In that sense, Don Condor is right: Reba is nothing, a tiny speck in comparison with the enormous influence of traditions, the rules of the herd—sanctified by centuries, unshakeable, tested, accessible to the dullest of the dull, freeing one from the necessity of thinking and wondering. And Don Reba probably wouldn’t even make it into a school curriculum. “A minor adventurer in the era of increasing absolutism.”

  Don Reba, Don Reba! Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor too skinny, neither particularly thick of hair nor anywhere near bald. Neither abrupt nor sluggish in his movements, with an unmemorable face that looks simultaneously like thousands of other faces. Polite, gallant to the ladies, an attentive conversationalist—but not notable for having any original thoughts.

  He emerged out of some musty basement of the palace bureaucracy three years ago, a petty, insignificant functionary, obsequious and pallid, with an almost bluish tint to his skin. Soon the then-First Minister was suddenly arrested and executed, a number of horror-stricken and bewildered officials died during torture, and this tenacious, ruthless genius of mediocrity grew like a pale fungus on their corpses. He’s no one. He’s from nowhere. This is not a powerful mind underneath a weak monarch, which has been known by history; not a great and terrible man who gives his life to the idea of unifying the country in the name of autocracy. This is no money-grubbing lackey, thinking only of gold and of women, killing right and left for the sake of power, and staying in power in order to kill. People even whispered that he wasn’t Don Reba at all, that Don Reba was a completely diffe
rent person, and this was God-knows-who, a werewolf, a double, a changeling.

  All of his schemes fell through. He instigated a fight between two influential families in the kingdom in order to weaken them and begin a broad offensive against the barony. But the families reconciled, clinked their goblets and declared an eternal union, and took a substantial chunk of land away from the king—land that had belonged to the Totzes of Arkanar since time immemorial. He declared war on Irukan, led the army to the border himself, drowned it in the swamps and lost it in the forests, left them all to fend for themselves, and fled back to Arkanar. Thanks to the efforts of Don Gug, which Don Reba of course had no idea about, he was able to make peace with the Duke of Irukan at the cost of two border towns. And after this, the king was forced to scrape out the bottom of the empty coffers in order to put down the peasant revolts that had swept the country.

  For these kinds of blunders, any minister would be hung upside down by his feet at the top of the Merry Tower, but Don Reba somehow remained in power. He abolished the Ministries of Education and Welfare, established the Ministry of the Defense of the Crown, and removed the ancestral aristocrats and the few scientists from their government posts. He caused a complete economic collapse, wrote the treatise On the Brutish Nature of the Farmer, and finally, a year ago, organized the “protective guard”—the gray troops. The monopolies had stood behind Hitler. No one was standing behind Don Reba, and it was obvious that the storm troopers would eventually devour him like a fly. But he kept twisting and turning, piling one absurdity on top of another, writhing around as if he was trying to deceive himself, as if he knew nothing but the paranoid task of exterminating any trace of culture. Just like Waga the Wheel, he had no past. Two years ago, any aristocratic mongrel would contemptuously speak about the “worthless boor who was deceiving His Majesty,” but nowadays every aristocrat you asked claimed to be related to the Minister of the Defense of the Crown through the maternal line.

  And now he wants Budach, Rumata thought. Another absurdity. Another bizarre feint of some sort. Budach is a bookworm. Bookworms get sent to the gallows. With a lot of pomp and noise, so that everyone knows about it. But there’s no pomp or noise. Therefore, he needs Budach alive. Why? Don Reba can’t be stupid enough to hope to force Budach to work for him. Or maybe he really is stupid. Maybe Don Reba is nothing more than a stupid, lucky schemer who doesn’t know what he wants himself, slyly making a fool of himself for all to see. It’s funny, I’ve been watching him for three years, and I still don’t understand what he is. Although if he’d been watching me, he wouldn’t understand either. That’s the curious thing—anything is possible. Basis theory only concretely specifies the psychological motivations of the principal personality types, but there are in fact as many types as there are people; any sort of person could come to power. For example, take a man who has spent his entire life annoying his neighbors. Spitting into their pots of soup, putting ground glass into their hay. Of course he’ll be removed eventually, but he’ll have plenty of time to spit, to chortle, to make mischief. And it doesn’t matter to him that he won’t make a mark on history, or that distant descendants will rack their brains as they attempt to fit his behavior into an already developed theory of historical progress.