Doomed City

by Arkady Strugatsky

  The Great Strategist was more than a strategist. A strategist always circles around within the limits of his strategy. The Great Strategist had abandoned all limits. Strategy was merely an insignificant element of his game; it was as incidental for him as it was for Andrei—a casual kind of move made on a whim. The Great Strategist had become great precisely because he had realized (or perhaps he had known since the day he was born) that it is not the one who knows how to play according to all the rules who wins; the one who wins is the one who is able to abandon all the rules at any moment when it is necessary, to impose his own rules, unknown to his opponent, on the game and, when necessary, abandon them too. Whoever said that one’s own pieces are less dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent? Rubbish, one’s own pieces are far more dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent! Whoever said that the king has to be protected and moved out of danger of check? Rubbish, there are no kings that cannot be replaced if necessary by some knight or even pawn. Whoever said that a pawn, after breaking through to the final row of squares, is obliged to become another piece? Nonsense, sometimes it can be far more useful to leave it as a pawn—let it stand on the edge of the abyss as an example to the other pawns . . .

  The damned cap kept sliding farther and farther down over Andrei’s eyes, making it harder and harder for him to follow what was going on around him. However, he could hear that the dignified silence no longer existed in the hall: he heard the clattering of tableware, a babble of many voices, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up. He caught a whiff of kitchen fumes. Someone declared in a loud, squeaky voice that rang through the entire house, “Georges! I’m deviwishwy hungwy. Teww them to bwing me a gwass of cuwaçao and some pine-app-uw, quickwy.”

  “I beg your pardon,” someone said with austere politeness, right in Andrei’s ear, squeezing in between Andrei and the board—he caught a glimpse of black coattails and polished lacquer shoes, and a hand raised high in the air, bearing a loaded tray, drifted over his head. And a white hand also placed a glass of champagne by Andrei’s elbow.

  The Brilliant Strategist had finally tapped and kneaded his papirosa into a state fit for smoking. He lit up and hazy, bluish smoke drifted out of his hairy nostrils, getting tangled in his magnificent but rather sparse mustache.

  And meanwhile the game continued. Andrei defended convulsively, retreated, maneuvered, and so far he had managed to act so that only people who were already dead anyway were lost. There they had carried away Donald with a bullet through his heart, and beside the wineglass on the table they had placed his pistol and suicide note: “Rejoice not in arriving, in departing do not grieve. Give the pistol to Voronin. It will come in handy sometime.” And there his brother and father had already carried the body of his grandmother, Evgenia Romanovna, sewn into old sheets, down the icebound stairway and added it to the stack of corpses . . . There now they had buried his father in a mass grave somewhere in the Piskariovskoye Cemetery, and the morose driver, sheltering his unshaven face from the biting wind, had driven his steamroller to and fro over the frozen corpses, tamping them down so that more could be fitted into a single grave . . . But the Great Strategist generously, cheerfully, and sardonically disposed of friends and strangers alike, and all his well-groomed men with little beards and medals shot themselves in the temple, threw themselves out windows, died as a result of hideous tortures, trampled over each other’s dead bodies to become queens and still remained pawns.

  And Andrei carried on agonizingly trying to understand what sort of game this was that he was playing, what its purpose was, what the rules were, and why all this was happening, and he was transfixed to the depths of his soul by the question: How had he become the adversary of the Great Strategist—he, a faithful soldier in the Strategist’s army, prepared at any moment to die for him, prepared to kill for him, not knowing any other goals except his goals, not believing in any means except the means indicated by him, not distinguishing the plans of the Great Strategist from the plans of the Universe? He greedily gulped down the champagne, without tasting anything at all, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a blinding flash of insight. But of course, he wasn’t an adversary of the Great Strategist at all. He was his ally, his faithful helper. That was it—the main rule of this game. It was played not by adversaries but by partners, allies; the game had only one set of goalposts, nobody lost, everybody won . . . apart, of course, from those who would not survive until the victory.

  Someone touched his legs and spoke under the table. “Would you be so kind as to move your foot?” Andrei looked down at his feet. There was a dark, glistening puddle down there, and a bald dwarf on his hands and knees was fidgeting beside it, holding a dried-out rag covered in dark blotches. Andrei suddenly felt nauseous and started looking at the board again. He had already sacrificed all the dead; now he only had the living left. The Great Strategist at the other side of the table curiously watched what he was doing and even seemed to be nodding in approval, baring his small, sparse teeth in a polite smile, and at that point Andrei felt that he couldn’t go on. It was a great game, the most noble of all games, a game in the name of the greatest of all goals that humankind had ever set itself, but Andrei couldn’t carry on playing it any longer.

  “I’ll step outside . . .” he said hoarsely. “Just for a moment.”

  It came out so quietly that he hardly even heard himself, but everybody immediately looked at him. Silence fell in the hall again, and somehow the visor of his cap didn’t bother him anymore, and now he could see them clearly, eye to eye, all of his own people, all of those who were still alive.

  Massive Uncle Yura with his faded army tunic gaping wide open and his roll-up cigarette crackling, looked at Andrei morosely; Selma smiled drunkenly, sprawling in an armchair with her legs hoicked up so high that he could see her little bottom in its pink, lacy panties; Kensi looked at him sagely and seriously, and standing beside him was Volodka Dmitriev, tousle-headed and as savagely unshaven as ever; and ensconced on the high, old chair that Seva Barabanov had only just abandoned to set off on his latest and final work assignment was wizen-faced Borka Chistyakov, with his aristocratic aquiline nose, looking as if he were about to ask, “Oh really, why are you bellowing like a sick elephant?”—they were all here, all his nearest and all his dearest, and they were all looking at him, and all differently, and at the same time their gazes all had something in common too, some common attitude toward him. Sympathy? Trust? Pity? No, it wasn’t that, and before he managed to understand what exactly it was, he suddenly spotted among these old, familiar faces someone he didn’t know at all, some Oriental with a yellowish face and slanting eyes—no, not Wang, but some subtle, even elegant Oriental, and he also got the feeling that someone very small was hiding behind this stranger, someone very, very small, dirty and ragged, probably a stray, homeless child . . .

  He got up abruptly, moved the chair back with a scraping sound, and turned away from them all, and after gesturing indefinitely in the direction and for the attention of the Great Strategist, he walked out of the hall, squeezing through between shoulders and stomachs, pushing some people aside, and as if to console him, someone mumbled somewhere close by, “Well, the rules allow it—let him take a moment to think and reflect on things . . . We just have to stop the clock . . .”

  Absolutely exhausted and soaked in sweat, he managed to reach the landing of the stairway and sat down directly on the carpet, not far from a torridly blazing fireplace. His cap had slipped down over his eyes again, so he didn’t even try to make out what sort of fireplace this was and what sort of people were sitting around the fireplace; he only sensed the soft, dry heat on his wet body that felt as if it had been badly beaten, and saw the half-dried but still sticky blotches on his shoes, and through the cozy crackling of the blazing logs he heard someone telling a story with measured elegance, listening closely to the sound of his own voice.

  “. . . Just imagine—a handsome fellow, shoulders like a barn door, a holder of all three degrees of the
Order of Glory—and let me tell you, they didn’t award a full set of those orders to just anybody, they were even rarer than Heroes of the Soviet Union. Well, a fine comrade, an excellent student, and all the rest of it. And yet, let me tell you, he had a certain strange quirk. He would turn up for a party at the pad of some pampered son of a general or marshal, but as soon as everyone paired up and started wandering off, it was out into the hallway, set his cap at a jaunty angle, and bye-bye. At first they thought he must have some abiding love of his own. But no—every now and again the boys would meet him in public places—in Gorky Park, say, or in various different clubs—with these absolute sluts, and always with different ones! I met him like that myself once. I looked—well, what a choice! As ugly as sin, stockings flapping round skinny legs, plastered with makeup—it’s horrible to speak of it . . . and back then, by the way, there wasn’t any makeup like there is nowadays—the girls used to line their eyebrows with boot blacking, as near as, dammit . . . Anyway, a glaring mésalliance, as they say. But he didn’t mind. Leading her along arm in arm, spinning her some kind of line, all in due order, and she’s simply melting, she’s proud and ashamed at the same time, happy as a pig in a peach orchard . . . And then one day at a bachelor get-together, we cornered him: come on, out with it, what is it with these perverted tastes of yours, how can you even walk with those whores without feeling sick, when the very finest beauties are pining for you . . . And, let me tell you, in the academy we had a Department of Education, a privileged little spot—they only accepted girls from the most illustrious families there . . . Well, at first he tried to laugh it off, then he gave in and told us something quite amazing. Comrades, he said, I know that I’m blessed with all the appurtenances, so to speak: I’m handsome, with medals, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I know all this about myself, he said, and I’ve received plenty of notes about it too. But there was this thing, he said, that just happened to me. I suddenly saw the misery of our women. Right through the war they never saw a single chink of light, they were starving all the time, they slaved away doing real men’s work—poor and homely, without even the slightest idea of what it’s like to be beautiful and desired. And so, he said, I set myself the goal of giving at least a few of them an experience so bright and vivid that they would have something to remember for the rest of their lives. I meet this streetcar driver, he said, or a worker from the Hammer and Sickle factory, or a miserable little teacher, who couldn’t have counted on any particular happiness even without the war, and now that so many men have been killed, she can’t see any ships at all coming in through the waves. I spend two or three evenings with them, he said, and then I disappear. Of course, when we part, I lie, I say I’m going on a long work assignment or something else that sounds plausible, and they’re left with this bright memory . . . at least some kind of bright spark in their lives, he said. I don’t know, he said, how it all looks from the viewpoint of high morals, but I have the feeling that by doing this I’m fulfilling at least some tiny little part of our male duty . . . When he told us all this, we were dumbfounded. Later on, of course, we started arguing, but the whole thing made a quite exceptional impression on us. He disappeared soon afterward, in fact. Back then a lot of us disappeared like that: orders from army command, and in the army you don‘t ask where you’re going and what for . . . I never saw him again.”

  Neither did I, thought Andrei. I never saw him again either. There were two letters—one to our mother, and one to me. And our mother received a notification: “Your son, Sergei Mikhailovich Voronin, died an honorable death while carrying out a combat mission from the army command.” It was in Korea. Under the pink watercolor sky of Korea, where the Great Strategist first tried his strength in a skirmish with American imperialism. He played his great game there, and Seryozha was left there, with his full set of Orders of Glory . . .

  I don’t want it. I don’t want this game. Maybe that’s the way everything has to be; maybe nothing is possible without playing this game. Maybe. Pretty certainly. But I can’t do it . . . I don’t know how. And I don’t even want to learn . . . So all right, then, he thought bitterly, it means I’m a poor soldier. Or rather, I’m just a soldier. And no more than a soldier. That selfsame soldier who doesn’t know how to reflect on things, so he has to obey blindly. And I’m not any kind of chess partner or ally of the Great Strategist, but just a tiny little cog in his colossal machine, and my place is not at the table in his inscrutable game but beside Wang, with Uncle Yura, with Selma . . . I’m a little stellar astronomer of average ability, and if I had managed to prove the existence of some connection between wide double stars and Schilt’s star streams, that would have been a very, very big deal for me. But as for solving great problems and achieving great things . . .

  And at this point he remembered that he was no longer a stellar astronomer, that he was an investigator in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and he had achieved quite a lot: using a specially trained network of agents and distinct investigative procedures to pinpoint this mysterious Red Building and infiltrate it, exposing its sinister secrets and creating all the necessary conditions for the successful elimination of this malignant phenomenon from our life . . .

  Lifting himself up on his hands, he slid down a step lower. If I go back to the table now, he thought, I’ll never get out of the Building. It will devour me. That’s quite clear: it has already devoured many people, we have witness testimony to that. But that’s not what’s most important. What’s important is that I have to get back to my office and untangle this ball of thread. That’s where my duty lies. That’s my responsibility, what I have do now. Everything else is a mirage . . .

  He slid down another two steps. He had to break free of the mirage and get back to work. There was nothing accidental about all this. Everything here had been superbly thought through. It was a hideous illusion, fabricated by provocateurs in an attempt to destroy belief in the ultimate victory, to pervert the concepts of morality and duty. And it was no accident that the sordid little New Illusion movie theater was there at one side of the Building. New! There was nothing new about pornography, but that place called itself new! Who were they fooling? But what was on the other side? The synagogue . . .

  He slid down the steps, going full tilt, and reached a door with the word EXIT on it. And after he had already taken hold of the handle, when he was still overcoming the resistance of the creaking spring, he suddenly realized what the common element was in all the eyes fixed on him up there. Reproach. They knew that he wouldn’t come back. He still hadn’t realized it himself, but they already knew for certain . . .

  He tumbled out into the street, avidly gulped down a huge mouthful of the damp, misty air, and his heart thrilled with joy to see that everything was still the same out here: murky gloom along Main Street to the right, murky gloom along Main Street to the left, and there in front of him, just across the street, was the motorcycle with the sidecar and the police driver, soundly asleep, with his head completely submerged in his collar. The fat bastard’s dozing, Andrei thought affectionately. He’s worn out. And then a voice inside him suddenly declared loudly, “Time!” and Andrei groaned and burst into tears of desperation, only now recalling the most important, the most terrible rule of the game. The rule invented specially to deal with namby-pamby sissies from the intelligentsia like him: anyone who breaks off the game loses all his pieces.

  Andrei swung back around with a howl of “Don’t!” and reached out for the brass door handle. But it was too late. The Building was already leaving, slowly backing away into the impenetrable gloom of the shadowy back alleys behind the synagogue and the New Illusion. It crept away with a palpable rustling and grating, with its windowpanes rattling and floor beams creaking. A tile fell off the roof and smashed on a stone step of the porch.

  Andrei clutched the brass handle with every ounce of his strength, but it seemed to have fused with the timber of the door, and the house was moving faster and faster, and Andrei was already running, almost being drag
ged after it, as if it were a departing train. He jerked and tugged on the door handle, and suddenly stumbled over something and fell, his cramped and twisted fingers slipped off the smooth brass whorls, he smashed his head very painfully against something, he saw a shower of bright stars, and something crunched in his skull, but he could still see the Building backing away, extinguishing its windows as it went; he saw it swerve behind the yellow wall of the synagogue, then reappear, as if it peeping out with its last two lit-up windows, and then those windows went out too, and darkness fell.

  3

  He was sitting on a bench facing the idiotic concrete basin of the fountain and pressing a damp handkerchief that was already warm against a massive bump over his right eye. The bump was horrific to touch and he was in absolute agony; the ache in his head felt so bad, he was afraid his skull might be fractured; his skinned knees stung; his bruised elbow had gone numb, but there were indications that it would soon be demanding his attention. Perhaps, however, all this was really for the best. All this lent what was happening an emphatic, crude reality. There was no more Building, there was no Strategist or dark, sticky puddle under a table, there was no game of chess, there was no betrayal, there was nothing but a man who was strolling absentmindedly through the dark and had tumbled over the low concrete barrier straight into the idiotic basin, smashing his stupid head and the rest of his body against the damp concrete . . .