The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  The stranger chuckled in a friendly way, took out a large gold watch with a diamond triangle on its cover, rang eleven times and said, “It’s eleven! And exactly an hour since I have been waiting for your awakening, as you told me to be here at ten. Here I am!”

  Styopa felt for his trousers on the chair next to bed, whispered, “Pardon me,” put them on, and asked raspily, “Please remind me of your last name?” It was difficult for him to talk. Someone jammed a needle in his brain with every word, causing infernal pain.

  “What? You’ve forgotten my last name as well?” The unknown smiled.

  “Forgive me,” Styopa rasped, and felt his hangover gift him with a new symptom: it seemed to him that the floor next to the bed receded somewhere and that this very moment he will plummet head first all the way to the devil’s mother in hell.

  “Dear Stepan Bogdanovich,” the visitor started with a perspicacious smile, “no Pyramidon will help you. Follow an old wise rule: cure like with the like. The only thing that will bring you back to life is two shots of vodka with some hot and spicy food.”

  Styopa was a cunning person, and no matter how unwell he was he realized that since he was caught, he should confess everything.

  “Frankly speaking,” he started, barely moving his tongue, “yesterday I just a bit…”

  “Not a word more!” replied the visitor and slid with his chair to the side.

  Styopa stared at the small table with a serving tray, on which there was sliced white bread, pressed caviar in a crystal dish, a saucer with marinated porcini mushrooms, something in a small pan, and finally vodka in the voluminous carafe that used to belong to the jeweler’s widow. Styopa was especially impressed that the carafe was fogged from cold. But that was understandable—it was placed in the ice-filled rinsing basin. In other words, everything was served cleanly and capably. The stranger did not let Styopa’s amazement to develop to a pathological degree, and neatly poured him half a shot glass of vodka.

  “And yourself?” Styopa squeaked.

  “With pleasure!”

  With jumping hand, Styopa carried the shot glass to his lips, as the stranger swallowed the contents of his with a single breath. Chewing on a piece of caviar, Styopa squeezed out, “But what about you…eat something?”

  “Thank you but I never eat with alcohol,” said the stranger and poured the second round.

  They opened the pan—there were wieners in tomato sauce.

  And now the accursed green spots before his eyes melted away, the words started to form properly and, most importantly, Styopa remembered something. Namely, that yesterday’s affair took place at Skhodnya, at the dacha of Khustov, a sketch writer, to which dacha Khustov himself brought Styopa over in a taxi. He also remembered hiring that taxi near the Metropol, and there was also some actor there…maybe not an actor, with a phonograph in a case. Yes yes yes, it was at the dacha! Also, he remembered, the dogs howled because of that phonograph. Only the woman he wanted to kiss stayed unclarified…devil knows who she is…possibly she works in radio, but maybe not.

  Yesterday thusly illuminated itself little by little, but Styopa was currently much more interested in the present day, and in particular in the appearance of the stranger in his bedroom, and with vodka and food. That would be good to clarify!

  “Well, now I hope you remembered my last name?”

  But Styopa only smiled in embarrassment and spread his hands.

  “Well then! I have a sense that after vodka you drank some Porto! Have mercy, one mustn’t do that!”

  “I wanted to ask you to keep it between us,” Styopa said obsequiously.

  “Oh, of course, of course! But obviously I am not promising the same for Khustov.”

  “Do you know Khustov?”

  “I saw that individual briefly in your office yesterday, but a single glance at his face is enough to realize that he is scum, a muckraker, a climber, and a bootlicker.”

  Absolutely correct, Styopa thought, impressed with such a true, precise, and terse definition of Khustov.

  Yes, yesterday coalesced from pieces, but anxiety would not leave the director of the Variety. The thing was, there was a giant black hole gaping in that day. Styopa had not seen this very stranger in the black beret, mercy be, in his office yesterday.

  “Professor of Black Magic Voland,” the visitor said significantly, seeing Styopa’s difficulties, and related everything in order.

  Yesterday afternoon he arrived to Moscow from abroad, immediately introduced himself to Styopa, and offered his tour to the Variety. Styopa called the Moscow Region Spectator Commission and coordinated this question (Styopa went pale and blinked), signed the contract for seven appearances of Professor Voland (Styopa’s mouth fell open), agreed that Voland would come and visit him to work out the details at ten in the morning the next day…and now Voland is visiting! As he arrived, he was greeted by the housekeeper Grunya, who has explained that she herself just got there, that she was not live-in, that Berlioz is not home, and that if the visitor wishes to see Stepan Bogdanovich, then he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich sleeps so soundly that she would not take it upon herself to rouse him. Once he saw Stepan Bogdanovich’s state, the performer sent Grunya to the nearest shop for vodka and food, and to the pharmacy to get some ice, and…

  “Let me square away with you,” devastated Styopa whined, and started looking for his wallet.

  “Oh, what nonsense!” said the touring magician and would not hear any more of it.

  Thus vodka and food were explained, and still Styopa presented a pathetic sight: he decidedly remembered nothing about the contract, and—on his life!—he did not see this Voland yesterday. Yes, there was Khustov but no Voland.

  “Allow me to see the contract,” quietly asked Styopa.

  “Please, please!”

  Styopa glanced at the paper and went cold. Everything was in order. Firstly, Styopa’s own extravagant signature! Sideways note from the financial director Rimsky with the permission to advance performer Voland ten thousand roubles against thirty-five thousand due to him for seven appearances. Moreover: Voland’s acknowledgment of the receipt of those ten thousand!

  What is this? miserable Styopa thought, and his head spun.

  Was it the beginning of malignant memory lapses? But of course after the presentation of the contract additional expression of surprise would be just obscene. Styopa asked his guest’s permission to step out for a moment, and ran, as he was in his socks, to the phone in the hallway. On his way he called in the direction of the kitchen, “Grunya!” but no one answered. Then he glanced at the door to Berlioz’s study and as they say turned to stone: there was a giant wax seal hanging off twine. “Hello!” someone barked in Styopa’s head. “As if things weren’t bad enough!” And then Styopa’s thoughts ran along the double track but, as always happens at times of a catastrophe, in all the wrong directions. The confusion in Styopa’s head is hard to even convey. There was the devilry with the black beret, cold vodka, and unlikely contract—and now, on top of it, sealwax on the door! If you would tell anyone that Berlioz got into some mischief, they wouldn’t believe you—oh no, they wouldn’t! But the seal, there it is! Indeed…

  And then the most unpleasant thoughts wormed their way into Styopa’s brain, about an article he—as if on purpose!—recently foisted on Mikhail Aleksandrovich for his magazine. And the article, between us, was foolish! Useless, and the money mere pittance…Immediately after the memory about the article a memory of some dubious conversation swooped in, that took place, as he remembered on April 24th, at night, when Styopa supped with Mikhail Aleksandrovich. That is, the conversation was not dubious per se (Styopa would never go this far), but the conversation touched on some unnecessary topic. By all means, citizens, you could’ve avoided even starting such a conversation. Before the seal, no doubt, such a talk could be considered insignificant, but a
fter the seal…

  “Ah, Berlioz, Berlioz!” Styopa’s head boiled. “Can’t even grasp such a thing!”

  But there was little time for grief, and Styopa dialed the office number of the Variety financial director Rimsky. Styopa’s position was a vulnerable one: first, the foreigner could take offense at being doubted even after he showed the contract, and the talk with the financial director would be quite a challenge. After all, one wouldn’t just ask, “Pray tell, did I sign a contract for thirty-five thousand rubles with the professor of black magic yesterday?” It wouldn’t do to ask that!

  “Yes!” Rimsky’s abrupt and unpleasant voice came from the receiver.

  “Hello, Grigory Danilovich,” Styopa said softly. “This is Likhodeev. So this is a thing…Errr…I have here this…eh…performer Voland…ahem. So…I wanted to ask, what about tonight?”

  “Oh, the Black Mage?” Rimsky in the receiver responded. “The posters will be ready presently.”

  “Uh-huh,” Styopa said weakly. “Ok, see you.”

  “And are you arriving soon?” Rimsky asked.

  “In half an hour,” Styopa answered and, having hanged the receiver, squeezed his burning head in his hands. Oh what a nasty affair it was turning out to be! What was happening to his memory, dear citizens? Huh?

  However lingering in the hallway any longer was awkward, and Styopa immediately conceived a plan: to by all means conceal his improbable forgetfulness, and as the first order of duty cunningly find out from the foreigner what exactly does he intend to perform in the Variety trusted in Styopa’s care?

  Then Styopa turned away from the telephone and in the hallway mirror, left undusted since long ago by lazy Grunya, he clearly saw some strange individual—long like a beanpole, wearing a pince-nez (oh, if only Ivan Nikolaevich was here! He would’ve recognized this subject right away!). And as he reflected, he disappeared immediately. Styopa, alarmed, stared into the hallway depths, and reeled for the second time, as the most enormous black cat walked in the mirror, and disappeared too.

  Styopa’s heart stopped, he swayed. What is this, he thought. Am I losing my mind? Where are those reflections coming from? He stared into the hallway and cried out pitifully, “Grunya! Some cat is loitering here! Where did he come from? And who is it with him?”

  “No worries, Stepan Bogdanovich,” a voice responded but not Grunya’s but the visitor’s from the bedroom. “The cat is mine. Don’t be nervous. And Grunya’s not here—I sent her to Voronezh, to her hometown, since she complained that you wouldn’t let her take time off in a long while.”

  These words were so unexpected and ridiculous that Styopa decided that he misheard. Completely distraught, he trotted to the bedroom and froze on the threshold. His hair stirred and the forehead beaded with a scattering of tiny drops of sweat.

  The guest no longer was alone but had company. The second armchair was occupied by that very person he glimpsed in the hallway. Now he was clearly visible: pencil mustache, one glistening glass of the pince-nez, the other one is missing. But even worse things manifested in that bedroom: on the jeweler’s widow’s ottoman, a third someone sprawled in a brazen pose: a black cat of terrifying size, a shot of vodka in one paw and a fork with a marinated mushroom in the other.

  The bedroom light, weak to begin with, turned decidedly dim in Styopa’s eyes. So this is how one goes insane, he thought and grabbed onto the door jamb.

  “I see you are slightly surprised, dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?” Voland inquired as Styopa’s teeth chattered. “By the way, there is no reason to be surprised. This is my retinue.”

  With that, the cat tossed back his vodka, and Styopa’s hand started sliding down the door frame.

  “And this retinue needs space,” Voland continued, “so someone here in this apartment is extraneous. And I believe that this precise person is you!”

  “Them, them!” the long, plaid one bleated like a goat, talking about Styopa in plural. “Overall, they lately have been a terrible pig. They drink, use their position to start affairs with the ladies, do nothing, not to mention they can’t even do anything, as they know nothing of things to them entrusted. Pulling wool over their superiors’ eyes!”

  “Misuse the official car for no reason,” the cat also snitched, chewing the mushroom.

  And then the fourth and the last apparition took place in the apartment, when Styopa, having slid to the floor altogether, clawed at the door frame with a weakened hand.

  Straight from the console mirror, a short but unusually broad-shouldered one stepped out, in a bowler hat, a fang sticking out of his mouth, disfiguring an already unbelievably ugly countenance. His hair was fiery-red.

  “I,” the new arrival joined the conversation, “can’t even understand how he became a director.” The ginger’s voice was growing more nasal with every word. “He’s as much a director as I am a bishop!”

  “You don’t look like a bishop, Azazello,” the cat observed, filling his plate with wieners.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” the ginger said. He then turned to Voland and asked respectfully, “Messir, your permission to toss him to hell out of Moscow?”

  “Scram!” The cat roared, his fur standing on end.

  And then the bedroom spun around Styopa, his head hit the door jamb and, and as he was losing consciousness, he thought, I am dying…

  But he did not die. As he squinted his eyes open, he saw himself sitting down on something made of stone. Something made noise all around him. When he opened his eyes properly, he saw that it was the sea making the noise, and that moreover, the wave was lapping at his feet, and that, long story short, he was sitting at the very edge of a breakwater, and that below him there was a blue shining sea, and behind him a beautiful city in the mountains.

  Unsure how people behaved in such circumstances, Styopa stood on his shaking legs and walked along the breakwater to the shore.

  On the breakwater a man stood, smoked, and spat in the sea. He stared at Styopa with wild eyes and stopped spitting. Then Styopa pulled this stunt: he knelt in front of the unfamiliar smoker and uttered, “I am begging you, tell me, what city is this?”

  “I say!” said the heartless smoker.

  “I am not drunk,” Styopa rasped. “I am ill, something happened to me, I’m ill…where am I? What city is it?”

  “Well, Yalta…”

  Styopa sighed softly, fell to his side, his head hitting the sun-warmed stone of the breakwater.

  Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was an Italian writer whose parents were both scientists and teachers. During World War II, he joined Italian partisans to fight against fascism, and after the war he joined the Communist Party. He began writing fables and stories in the early 1940s, then in 1947 published his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, a realistic book about the war. He published more stories and novellas through the 1950s, often moving away from the realism he had become known for, which led to criticism from Communists who valued only social realism; Calvino quit the party in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. That same year he published an important anthology, Italian Folktales, which remains influential. In 1967, Calvino moved to Paris and became interested in the structuralism and narratology of Roland Barthes and the experimental forms of the Oulipo group of writers, leading him to write such internationally revered books as Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Calvino’s more experimental writing began before his move to Paris, however; in the early 1960s, he started writing tales he called “cosmicomics,” tales of the origins of the universe, most of which begin with a statement of some sort of quasi-scientific hypothesis and continue as a narrative related by Qfwfq, a being present at the Big Bang and most of the important moments of cosmic history. While inspired by science (and the science fiction stories of Calvino’s friend Primo Levi), the cosmicomic stories depict a science fantasy past. “The Origin of the Birds” was f
irst published in Italian as “L’origine degli Uccelli” in 1967 and appeared in the second cosmicomic collection in English, Time and the Hunter (aka T Zero) in 1968. It is included in The Complete Cosmicomics (2002). When Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985, Gore Vidal wrote that “Europe regarded Calvino’s death as a calamity for culture.”

  THE ORIGIN OF THE BIRDS

  Italo Calvino

  Translated by William Weaver

  THE APPEARANCE OF BIRDS comes relatively late, in the history of evolution, following the emergence of all the other classes of the animal kingdom. The progenitor of the Birds—or at least the first whose traces have been found by palaeontologists—is the Archaeopteryx (still endowed with certain characteristics of the Reptiles from which he descends), who dates from the Jurassic period, tens of millions of years after the first Mammals. This is the only exception to the successive appearance of animal groups progressively more developed in the zoological scale.

  * * *

  —

  In those days we weren’t expecting any more surprises—Qfwfq narrated—by then it was clear how things were going to proceed. Those who existed, existed; we had to work things out for ourselves: some would go further, some would remain where they were, and some wouldn’t manage to survive. The choice had to be made from a limited number of possibilities.

  But instead, one morning I hear some singing, outside, that I have never heard before. Or rather (since we didn’t yet know what singing was), I hear something making a sound that nobody has ever made before. I look out. I see an unknown animal singing on a branch. He had wings feet tail claws spurs feathers plumes fins quills beak teeth crop horns crest wattles and a star on his forehead. It was a bird; you’ve realized that already, but I didn’t; they had never been seen before. He sang: “Koaxpf. Koaxpf. Koaaacch…,” he beat his wings, striped with iridescent colors, he rose in flight, he came to rest a bit further on, resumed his singing.