It was pointless to shout—he couldn’t even hear himself—and Maxim turned back to Fank, who was lying slumped back with his head dangling, kneading his temples, cheeks, and cranium with all his might, and there was saliva bubbling out between his lips. Maxim realized that Fank was suffering intolerable pain; he took a firm hold of Fank’s elbows, hurriedly bracing himself in order to transfuse the pain into himself. He wasn’t sure that it would work with a being from a different planet—he couldn’t find the nerve contact he was looking for—and then Fank suddenly tore his hands away from his temples and started pushing Maxim in the chest with what little strength he had left, desperately muttering something in a tearful, wailing voice. The only thing Maxim could understand was: “Go, go . . .” Fank was obviously raving.
At that point the door beside Fank swung open and two flushed faces, crowned by black berets and surmounting rows of glinting metal buttons, were thrust into the car. Immediately a multitude of firm, strong hands grabbed Maxim by his shoulders, sides, and neck, tore him away from Fank, and dragged him out. He didn’t resist—there was no menace or evil intent in these hands, quite the opposite in fact. He was dragged away into the crowd, and from there he saw the two men in berets leading Fank, doubled over, to the yellow vehicle, and another three men in berets driving the people who were waving their arms around away from him. And then the crowd roared as it closed around the crippled car, which awkwardly stirred, rising up and turning on its side, so that Maxim briefly glimpsed its wheels slowly turning in the air, and then it was already lying on its roof, and the crowd was clambering onto it, and everybody was shouting and singing, and they were all in the grip of some strange, rabid, frenzied merriment.
Maxim was forced back toward the wall of a building and pressed up against the wet glass of a shop window. Craning his neck to look over people’s heads, he saw the square yellow automobile, covered with a multitude of bright, glittering lights, start moving with a brassy screech, force its way through the crowd of people and vehicles, and disappear from sight.
4
Late that evening Maxim realized he had seen quite enough of this city, and he didn’t want to see any more, but he did want to eat something. He had spent the entire day on his feet and seen a quite extraordinary number of things, without understanding very much at all, but simply by listening he had learned several new words and identified several of the local letters on signs and posters. The unfortunate incident with Fank had bewildered and startled him, but overall he was glad to have been left to his own devices once again. He liked his independence, and he had missed it all the time he was stuck in Hippopotamus’s five-story termite hill with its poor ventilation. After thinking for a while, he had decided to temporarily get lost. Politeness was all very well, but information was more important. Of course, the first contact procedure was a sacred business, but no better chance to gather independent information was likely to come his way.
The city had astounded him. It was huddled down close against the ground. All the traffic here moved either across the ground or under the ground, and the gigantic spaces between buildings and above buildings were left empty, abandoned to the smoke, rain, and mist. The city was gray, smoky, colorless, and somehow the same everywhere—not because of the buildings, which included some rather beautiful ones, not because of the uniform teeming of the crowds on the streets, not because of the incessant dampness, and not because of the incredible lifelessness of its unrelenting stone and asphalt. Its sameness sprang from something more basic than all that. It was like a gigantic clockwork mechanism, in which none of the component parts are identical but everything moves, turns, engages, and disengages in a unified, endless rhythm, any change in which signifies only one thing: malfunction, breakdown, and stoppage. Streets with tall stone buildings were succeeded by small streets with little wooden houses; swarming crowds were succeeded by the magnificent emptiness of broad public squares; gray, brown, and black suits under elegant capes were succeeded by gray, brown, and black rags under tattered, faded cloaks; regular, uniform droning was succeeded by the sudden, frenzied blaring of car horns, howling, and singing; all of this was interconnected, rigidly interlinked, and predetermined since time immemorial by certain unfathomable, internal functional correlations, and nothing had any independent significance. All the people looked just the same, they all acted in exactly the same way, and the moment you could get a close look and grasp the rules of crossing the streets, you vanished, dissolving into all the other people, and you could move along in the crowd for a thousand years without attracting the slightest attention. This was probably a complicated world, controlled by many laws, but Maxim had already discovered one of them, the main one: do what everybody else does, and do it in the same way as they do it. For the first time in his life he wanted to be like everybody else.
He saw some individuals who behaved differently from everybody else, and these people filled him with a keen sense of revulsion—they barged their way across the flow, staggering and grabbing at people coming toward them, slipping and falling, they had a repulsive and surprising smell, and other people shunned them but left them alone. Some of these individuals even lay stretched out beside walls in the rain.
Maxim also did as everybody else did. Moving with the crowd, he flocked into the echoing public emporiums under dirty glass roofs; moving with everybody else, he emerged from these emporiums; moving with everybody else, he went down under the ground, squeezed into overcrowded electric trains, and went hurtling off somewhere with an incredible rumbling and clattering; swept onward with the torrent, he then came back up onto the surface, into new streets exactly like the old ones; when the flow of people divided, Maxim chose one of the streams and went whirling away with it . . .
Then evening came, the feeble streetlamps came on, hanging high up above the ground and not illuminating anything, and the large streets became completely congested. In the face of this congestion Maxim retreated and found himself in an almost empty, dimly lit side street. That was where he realized he’d had enough for today and stopped.
He saw three glowing golden spheres, a blinking blue sign woven out of gas discharge tubes, and a door leading into a semi-basement area. He already knew that as a rule three golden spheres were used to indicate places where food was served. He walked down the chipped steps and saw a small dining area with a low ceiling, ten empty tables, a floor that had just been sprinkled with fresh sawdust, and a glass buffet laden with brightly lit bottles of liquids in all the colors of the rainbow. There was almost no one in this café. A pudgy elderly woman in a white jacket with the sleeves turned up was sluggishly moving around behind a nickel-plated barrier beside the buffet; a little distance away a diminutive but sturdy man with a pale, square face and a thick black mustache was sitting at a round table in a casual pose. There was no one here shouting, or teeming, or emitting narcotic fumes.
Maxim walked in, chose a table in a niche as far away as possible from the buffet, and took a seat. The pudgy woman behind the barrier looked in his direction and said something in a hoarse, loud voice. The man with the mustache also glanced at him with vacant eyes, turned away, picked up a tall glass containing a transparent liquid that was sitting in front of him, took a sip, and set it back down. Somewhere a door slammed and a pretty young woman in a white, lacy apron appeared in the room, looked around to find Maxim, walked over to him, leaned on the table with her fingers, and started looking over his head. She had clear, delicate skin, a light down on her upper lip, and beautiful gray eyes. Maxim debonairly touched the tip of his nose with his finger and said, “Maxim.”
The girl looked at him in astonishment, as if she had only just noticed him. She was so sweet that Maxim couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear, and she smiled too, pointed to her nose, and said, “Rada.”
“Good,” said Maxim. “Supper.”
She nodded and asked something. Maxim nodded too, just to be on the safe side. He smiled as he watched her walk away—she was slim and light
, and it was pleasant to recall that this world also had beautiful people in it.
The pudgy woman at the buffet uttered a long, querulous phrase and retreated behind her barrier. They adore barriers here, thought Maxim. They have barriers everywhere. As if everything here were high voltage. At this point he realized that the man with the mustache was looking at him, and looking at him in an unpleasant, unfriendly kind of way. And on closer inspection, the man himself had a generally unfriendly air about him. It was hard to say exactly what the issue was, but for some reason he aroused associations with either a wolf or a monkey. So let him stare. We won’t worry about him . . .
Rada appeared again and set down a plate of steaming meat-and-vegetable mush and a thick glass mug of frothy liquid in front of Maxim.
“Good,” said Maxim, and slapped the chair beside him in invitation. He very much wanted Rada to sit there for a while as he was eating and tell him about something, so that he could listen to her voice for a while, and she could sense how much he liked her and how good he felt being beside her.
But Rada only smiled and shook her head. She said something—Maxim made out the word “sit”—and walked away to the barrier. A pity, thought Maxim. He took the two-pronged fork and started eating, trying to compose a phrase expressing friendliness, liking, and a need for companionship out of the thirty words that he knew.
Standing there, leaning back against the barrier with her arms crossed, Rada kept glancing at him. Every time their eyes met, they smiled at each other, and Maxim was rather surprised that every time Rada’s smile became paler and more uncertain. He himself was experiencing very mixed feelings. He enjoyed looking at Rada, but this sensation was mingled with a growing sense of disquiet. He had a feeling of satisfaction from the food, which proved to be surprisingly delicious and quite hearty, but at the same time he could sense the sidelong glance of the man with the mustache and unmistakably discern the pudgy woman’s disapproval emanating from behind the barrier . . . He took a cautious sip from the mug—it was beer, cold and fresh, but rather too strong. Not for everyone.
The man with the mustache said something, and Rada walked over to his table. They struck up a muted conversation, ill tempered and hostile, but at that point a fly attacked Maxim, and he had to do battle with it. The fly was brawny, blue, and brazen, and it seemed to come flying at Maxim from all sides at once; it buzzed and droned as if it were making a declaration of love to him; it refused to fly away, it wanted to be here, with him and his plate, walking over them and licking them; it was obstinate and garrulous. The whole business finished with Maxim making a false move and the fly crashing into his beer. Maxim fastidiously moved the mug to another table and set about eating the stew.
Rada came over and asked him something without smiling, looking off to the side. “Yes,” said Maxim, just to be on the safe side. “Rada is good.”
She glanced at him in undisguised fright, walked away to the barrier, and came back, carrying a shot glass of brown liquid on a saucer.
“Tastes good,” said Maxim, giving the girl an affectionate, concerned look. “What’s bad? Rada, sit here, talk. Must talk. Mustn’t go away.”
This carefully thought-out oration produced an unexpectedly bad impression on Rada. Maxim actually thought she was going to burst into tears. In any case, her lips started trembling, and she whispered something and ran out of the room. The pudgy woman behind the barrier uttered several indignant words. I’m doing something wrong, Maxim anxiously thought. But he absolutely couldn’t imagine what it was. All he understood was that neither the man with the mustache nor the pudgy woman wanted Rada to “sit and talk” with him. But since they were obviously not representatives of public authority or guardians of the law, and since Maxim was obviously not breaking any laws, there was probably no need to take the opinion of these disgruntled individuals into consideration.
The man with the mustache muttered something under his breath but with a distinctly unpleasant intonation, finished his glass in a single gulp, took a thick, black, lacquered cane out from under the table, got up, and unhurriedly walked across to Maxim. He sat down facing him, set the cane across the table, and, without looking at Maxim but clearly addressing him, started straining slow, heavy words through his teeth, frequently repeating the word “massaraksh.” His speech seemed as black and polished by frequent use as his ugly cane; this speech contained a distinct, black threat, and a challenge, and animosity, and all of this was strangely blurred by the indifference of his intonation, the indifference on his face, and the vacancy of his glassy eyes.
“I don’t understand,” Maxim said angrily.
Then the man with the mustache turned his pale face toward Maxim, seeming to look straight through him, slowly asked a question, enunciating every word separately, then suddenly whipped a knife with a long, narrow, glittering blade out of the cane. Maxim was actually caught unawares. Not knowing what to say or how to react, he picked up the fork off the table and twirled it in his fingers. That had an unexpected effect on the man with the mustache, who softly sprang back, knocking over his chair, but without standing up; he awkwardly squatted down, holding the knife out in front of him. His mustache rose up, revealing his long, yellow teeth.
The pudgy woman behind the barrier gave an ear-splitting squeal, and Maxim jumped to his feet in surprise. The man with the mustache was suddenly right up close to him, but at that very second Rada appeared out of nowhere, set herself between the man and Maxim, and started shouting loudly and vehemently—first at the man with the mustache and then, turning around, at Maxim. At this stage Maxim understood absolutely nothing at all, but the man with the mustache suddenly gave a gruesome smile, picked up his cane, hid the knife in it, and set off toward the exit. In the doorway he looked back, flung out a few words in a quiet voice, and disappeared.
Pale-faced, with her lips trembling, Rada picked up the fallen chair, wiped up the spilled brown liquid with a napkin, collected the dirty dishes and took them away, then came back and said something to Maxim. Maxim replied, “Yes,” but that didn’t help. Rada repeated the same thing, and her voice sounded angry, but Maxim sensed that she was less angry than frightened. “No,” Maxim said, and the woman behind the barrier immediately started yelling, with her cheeks quaking, and then Maxim finally confessed, “I don’t understand.”
The woman darted out from behind the barrier and flew across to Maxim, without stopping yelling even for a second. She planted herself in front of him with her hands propped on her hips, still yelling. Then she grabbed hold of his clothes and started crudely rifling through his pockets. Maxim was dumbfounded and didn’t try to resist. He simply kept repeating, “Mustn’t,” and plaintively glancing at Rada. The pudgy woman shoved him in the chest and, as if she had made some terrible decision, rushed back to her place behind the barrier and grabbed the receiver of the phone there. Maxim realized that he had been discovered not to have all those pink and green pieces of paper with lilac imprints, without which it was apparently not permitted to appear in public spaces here.
“Fank!” he declared with feeling. “Fank is unwell! Go. Bad.”
But then the situation was unexpectedly defused. Rada said something to the pudgy woman, who dropped the phone, carried on clucking for a little longer, and calmed down. Rada sat Maxim in his old place, put a new mug of beer down in front of him, and, to his indescribable delight and relief, sat down beside him. For a while everything went very well. Rada asked questions, Maxim, glowing with delight, replied, “I don’t understand,” and the pudgy woman muttered in the distant background. Focusing intensely, Maxim constructed another phrase and declared that “rain falls massaraksh bad mist.” Rada burst into laughter, and then another young and rather pretty girl arrived and said hello to everybody, she and Rada left the room, and a little while later Rada appeared without her apron, wearing a glittering red cape with a hood and carrying a large check bag.
“Let’s go,” she said, and Maxim jumped to his feet. But they weren’t a
llowed to leave just like that. The pudgy woman raised a hue and cry again. There was something else she didn’t like, and she started demanding something. This time she was waving a pen and a sheet of paper in the air. Rada argued with her for a while, but the second girl came up and took the woman’s side. They were making an obvious point of some kind, and Rada eventually conceded defeat. Then all three of them started pestering Maxim. At first they kept asking one and the same question separately and in chorus, and Maxim, naturally, didn’t understand. He merely shrugged. Then Rada told everyone to be quiet, gently patted Maxim on the chest, and asked, “Mak Sim?”
“Maxim,” he corrected her. “Maxim. Mak—mustn’t. Sim—mustn’t. Maxim.”
Then Rada set her finger to her nose and said, “Rada Gaal. Maxim . . .”
Maxim finally realized that for some reason his surname was required, which was strange in itself, but he was far more surprised by something else. “Gaal?” he blurted out. “Gai Gaal?”
Everyone fell silent. They were all astounded.
“Gai Gaal,” Maxim happily repeated. “Gai is good.”
There was uproar, with all the women speaking at once. Rada started pestering Maxim, repeatedly asking him about something. She was obviously terribly interested in how Maxim knew Gai. Gai, Gai, Gai—the name kept surfacing in the torrent of incomprehensible words. The question about Maxim’s own surname was forgotten.
“Massaraksh!” the pudgy woman finally exclaimed, and burst out laughing. The girls started laughing too, and Rada handed Maxim her check bag and took him by the arm, and they walked out into the rain.
The Inhabited Island Page 6
