Doomed City

by Arkady Strugatsky

  “And another amusing thing,” Izya said, “is that no one actually builds this temple consciously . . . It can’t be planned out in advance on paper or in the brain of some genius; it grows of its own accord, unerringly absorbing all the best that human history produces.

  “Maybe you think,” Izya asked acidly, “that the most exceptional builders of this temple aren’t swine? Lord Almighty, what hideous swine they are sometimes! The thief and scoundrel Benvenuto Cellini, the hopeless drunk Hemingway, the pederast Tchaikovsky, the schizophrenic and black reactionary Dostoyevsky, the thief and gallows bird François Villon . . . My God, the decent people among them are the rare ones! But like the coral polyps, they know not what they do. And neither does the whole of humankind. Generation after generation they guzzle, wallow in pleasure, ravage, kill, turn up their toes—and before you know it an entire coral atoll has sprung up, and how beautiful it is! And how enduring!”

  “Well OK then,” Andrei said to him. “So it’s a temple. The only imperishable embodiment of value. OK. But then, what have we all got to do with this? What have I got to do with this?”

  “Stop!” said Izya, grabbing his harness. “Wait. The stones.”

  Yes, the stones here were certainly convenient—rounded and flat, like solidified cowpats.

  “Are we going to build yet another temple?” Andrei asked with a chuckle. He took off his harness, stepped to one side, and picked up the nearest stone. The stone was exactly the kind required for a foundation—lumpy and prickly underneath, and smooth on the top, worn down by the dust and the wind. Andrei set it on a fairly level deposit of small pieces of crumbled stone, ground it in with movements of his shoulders as deeply and firmly as he could, and went to get another one.

  While he was laying out the foundation he felt something like satisfaction: after all, this was work, wasn’t it, not meaningless movements of the legs but actions performed with a definite goal in mind? The goal could be contested; Izya could be declared a psycho and a crank (which, of course, he was) . . . But working like this, stone after stone, Andrei could lay out, as evenly as possible, the platform for a foundation.

  Izya panted and grunted beside him, rolling the largest stones, stumbled, and tore the sole completely off his shoe, and when the foundation was ready, he galloped to his cart and extracted another copy of his Guidebook from under the rags.

  When, at the Crystal Palace, they had finally realized and almost believed that they would never meet anyone again on the journey north, Izya had sat down at a typewriter and dashed off at supernatural speed A Guidebook to the Crazy World. Then he had personally reproduced this Guidebook on a bizarre copying machine (in the Crystal Palace they had all sorts of different amazing machines); he had personally sealed all fifty copies in envelopes of a strange, transparent, and very strong material that was called “polyethylene film” and loaded up his cart right to the top, leaving only just enough room for a sack of rusks . . . And now he only had about ten, or maybe even fewer, of these envelopes left.

  “How many of them do you still have?” asked Andrei.

  Setting an envelope at the center of the foundation, Izya replied absentmindedly, “Damned if I know . . . Not many. Give me some stones.”

  Again they started dragging stones, and soon a pyramid a meter and a half tall had sprung up over the envelope. It looked rather strange in this desolate landscape, but to make it look even stranger still, Izya poured poisonous red paint over the stones from a huge tube that he had found in the storeroom under the Tower. Then he moved away to his cart, sat down, and started binding the detached sole of his shoe with a piece of string. While he was doing it, he kept glancing at his pyramid, and the doubt and uncertainty in his face were gradually replaced by a look of satisfaction and burgeoning pride.

  “Eh?” he said to Andrei, completely puffed up with conceit at this stage. “Not even an absolute fool would walk past it—he’d realize it had a purpose.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Andrei, squatting down beside Izya. “And a fat lot of good it’ll do you when this pyramid is excavated by some absolute fool.”

  “Never mind, never mind,” Izya growled. “A fool is a rational creature too. If he doesn’t understand, he’ll tell others about it . . .” He suddenly brightened up. “Take myths, for instance! As we know, fools are the overwhelming majority, which means that the witness to any interesting event has generally been a fool. Ergo: a myth is a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. Eh?”

  Andrei didn’t answer. He was looking at the pyramid. The wind cautiously crept up to it, uncertainly stirred the dust around it, whistled feebly between the stones, and Andrei suddenly pictured very clearly to himself the countless numbers of kilometers left behind them, and the thin dotted line of pyramids like this, stretching across those kilometers, abandoned to the wind and to time . . . And he also pictured a traveler, almost a desiccated mummy, crawling up to this pyramid on his hands and knees, dying of hunger and thirst . . . how frantically, straining every last ounce of strength, he tugs out these stones and thrusts them aside, breaking his nails, and his inflamed imagination is already painting him a picture of a secret cache of food and water, there under the stones . . . Andrei let out a hysterical snigger. At that moment I’d definitely shoot myself. It’s not possible to survive something like that . . .

  “What’s wrong with you?” Izya asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing, nothing, everything’s fine,” Andrei said, and got up.

  Izya got up too, and looked at the pyramid critically for a while. “There’s nothing funny about it!” he declared, and stamped the foot that was bound with shaggy string. “It will do for a start,” he declared. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes, let’s go.”

  Andrei harnessed himself to his cart, but Izya couldn’t resist the temptation and walked around his pyramid once again. He was obviously imagining something, pictures of some kind, and these pictures were flattering to his inner spirit; he smiled stealthily, rubbing his hands together and panting noisily into his beard.

  “Well, you’re a real sight!” Andrei said, unable to stop himself. “Just like a toad. You’ve dumped a load of eggs, and now you’re totally stupefied with pride. Or like a keta salmon.”

  “You watch your mouth!” said Izya, threading his arms into the harness. “The keta dies after that business.”

  “Precisely,” said Andrei.

  “So watch your mouth!” Izya said menacingly, and they moved on.

  Then Izya suddenly asked, “Have you ever eaten keta?”

  “Tons of it,” said Andrei. “D’you know how great it is with vodka? Or on a sandwich with tea . . . Why?”

  “I just wondered,” said Izya. “But my daughters have never tried it.”

  “Daughters?” Andrei exclaimed in surprise. “You have daughters?”

  “Three of them,” said Izya. “And not one of them knows what a keta salmon is. I explained to them that keta and sturgeon are extinct fish. Like the ichthyosaurs. And they’ll tell their children the same thing about herring . . .”

  He said something else, but Andrei was too stunned to listen. Would you ever believe it! Three daughters. Izya has three daughters! I’ve known him for six years and nothing like that ever even occurred to me. So then how come he took the plunge and decided to come here? Way to go, Izya . . . What damned crazy people there are in the world . . . But no, guys, he thought. It’s all right, it all fits: no normal person will ever reach this pyramid. Once any normal person has reached the Crystal Palace, he’ll just stay there for the rest of his life. I saw them there, those normal people . . . You can’t tell their faces from their asses . . . No, guys, if anyone does reach this pyramid, it can only be some kind of Izya number two . . . And how eagerly he’ll dig up this pyramid and rip open the envelope, and then immediately forget about everything—he’ll die here, still reading . . . But then, on the other hand, I ended up here, didn’t I? For what? It was good in the Tower. It was
even better in the Pavilion. And in the Crystal Palace . . . I’ve never lived like I did in the Crystal Palace and I never will again . . . So all right . . . It’s Izya. He’s got an awl up his ass and he can’t sit still anywhere. But if Izya hadn’t been with me, would I have left that place or stayed? That’s the question!

  “Why do we have to go forward?” Izya asked at the Plantation, and the little blackface girls, with smooth skin and big tits, sat nearby and meekly listened to us. “Why, after all, do we have to go forward, regardless of everything?” Izya pontificated, absentmindedly stroking the nearest one on her satin-smooth knee. “Why, because behind us there is either death, or boredom, which is also death. That simple observation must be enough for you, surely? After all, we’re the first, do you understand that? After all, not a single person has yet passed right through this world from one end to the other: from the jungles and the swamps all the way to the zero point . . . And maybe this whole bag of tricks was only set up in order to find a man like that? So that he would go the whole way?”

  “What for?” Andrei asked morosely.

  “How should I know?” Izya exclaimed indignantly. “But what is the temple being built for? It’s obvious that the temple is the only goal in sight, but asking what it’s for isn’t the correct question. Man has to have a goal, he can’t manage without a goal, that’s what he was given reason for. If he doesn’t have a goal, he invents one.”

  “And you’ve invented yours,” said Andrei. “You have to go all the way. What sort of goal is that?”

  “I didn’t invent it,” said Izya. “It’s my unique one and only. I’ve got nothing to choose from. It’s either the goal or aimlessness—that’s the way things are for you and me.”

  “But why do you keep hammering that temple of yours into my head?” Andrei asked. “What has your temple got to do with all this?”

  “It has a lot to do with it,” Izya parried keenly, as if this was exactly what he’d been waiting for. “The temple, my dear Andriushka, is not only eternal books, not only eternal music. Otherwise they would only have started building the temple after Gutenberg or, as you were taught, after Ivan Fyodorov. No, my dear man, the temple is also built out of deeds. If you like, the temple is cemented together by deeds; it is held up by them, it rests on them. It all began with deeds. First the deed, then the legend, and all the rest only comes afterward. Naturally, what is meant here is the exceptional deed, one that exceeds the normal bounds, inexplicable, if you like. That’s what the temple began with—the significant deed!”

  “The heroic deed, in short,” Andrei observed, chuckling derisively.

  “Well, so be it, let’s call it heroic,” Izya agreed condescendingly.”

  “In other words, you turn out to be a hero,” said Andrei. “In other words, you long to be a hero. Sinbad the Sailor and the mighty Ulysses . . .”

  “And you’re a stupid fool,” said Izya. He said it affectionately, without the slightest offense intended. “I assure you, my friend, that Ulysses didn’t long to be a hero. He simply was a hero. That was his nature. He couldn’t be any other way. You can’t eat shit—it makes you puke, and it made him feel sick being a little king in his seedy little Ithaca. I can see that you pity me, you know: what a crank, a total screwball . . . I can see that. But there’s no need for you to pity me. Because I know with absolute certainty that the temple is being built, that nothing else serious is happening in history apart from this, and there’s only one purpose in my life—to protect that temple and increase its wealth. Of course, I’m not Homer and I’m not Pushkin; I won’t get to put a brick in the wall. But I am Katzman. And that temple is in me, and that means I’m a part of the temple, it means that with my recognition of myself the temple has expanded by one more human soul. And that’s already wonderful. Even if I don’t add a single scrap to the wall . . . Although I’ll try to add one, you can be quite sure of that. It will definitely be a very small speck—and, even worse, in time that speck might simply fall off, it won’t be any use to the temple, but in any case I know that the temple was in me, and I also lent it strength . . .”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” said Andrei. “Your explanation is too confused. Some kind of religion: temple, spirit . . .”

  “Well, of course,” said Izya, “since it’s not a bottle of vodka and it’s not a twin mattress, it’s got to be religion. What are you getting bristly about? You’re the one who’s been nagging me about how you’ve lost the ground under your feet and you’re suspended in empty space . . . And that’s right, you are. That’s what had to happen to you. It happens to any man who thinks even the tiniest little bit . . . Well, I’m giving you some ground. The most solid ground there can ever be. Plant both feet on it and stand there, if you want, and if you don’t, then bug off! But don’t bellyache afterward!”

  “You’re not presenting me with ground to stand on,” said Andrei, “you’re fobbing me off with some kind of amorphous cloud! Well, OK. Let’s say I’ve understood all about this temple of yours. Only what good is that to me? I’m not good enough to be one of the builders of your temple—I’m no Homer, either, to put it mildly . . . But you at least have the temple in your soul, you can’t live without it—I can see the way you run around the world like a little puppy, avidly sniffing at everything, and whatever you come across, you lick it or take a bite to see how it tastes! I see the way you read. You can read twenty-four hours a day . . . and you actually remember everything too . . . But I can’t do any of that. I like to read, but in moderation, after all. I love listening to music. But not twenty-four hours a day either! And my memory’s absolutely ordinary—I can’t possibly enrich it with all the treasures that mankind has accumulated . . . Even if I never did anything else—I still couldn’t. With me it flies in one ear and out the other. So now what good is your temple to me?”

  “Well that’s true, that’s right,” said Izya. “I won’t argue. The temple’s not for everyone . . . I won’t deny that it’s the heritage of the minority, a matter of human nature . . . But you listen, and I’ll tell you the way I see it. The temple has”—Izya started counting on his fingers—“builders. Those are the ones who construct it. And then, let’s say . . . goddammit, I can’t find the right word, religious terminology keeps coming to mind . . . Well, all right. Let’s call them priests. They’re the ones who bear it within themselves. The ones through whose souls it grows and in whose souls it exists . . . And there are consumers—those who, so to speak, partake of it . . . So then Pushkin is a builder. I’m a priest. And you’re a consumer . . . Don’t pull that face, you fool! That’s really great! After all, without a consumer, the temple wouldn’t have any human meaning. Just think how lucky you are, you blockhead! After all, it takes years and years of special processing, brainwashing, and supremely cunning systems of deception to provoke you, the consumer, into attempting to destroy the temple . . . And there’s no way the kind of consumer you’ve become now can be pushed into that sort of thing, except maybe under threat of death! Just think, you rattlebrain: the ones like you are an extremely small minority too! Give the majority the wink, give them permission, and off they’ll go, whooping and hollering to smash everything with crowbars, burn everything to the ground with blazing torches . . . that has already happened, many times over! And it will probably happen again, time after time . . . And you complain! But if it is possible at all to ask, what is the temple for? there can only be one answer: for you!”

  “Andriukha!” Izya called in that familiar, obnoxious voice. “Maybe we should grab a drink?”

  They were standing right on the very top of a massive hillock. On the left, the side where the Cliff was, everything was concealed behind a murky veil of dust hurtling along at furious speed, but on the right the air had cleared for some reason, and they could see the Yellow Wall—not smooth and even, the way it was within the limits of the City, but completely covered in mighty folds and wrinkles, like the root of some monstrous tree. Ahead of them at the bottom of the
Wall, a field of white stone began—not loose chips but solid stone, a single, monolithic mass—and this field of stone extended as far as the eye could see, and swaying above it half a kilometer away from the hillock were two tall, scrawny dust devils—one yellow and the other black . . .

  “This is something new,” Andrei said, screwing up his eyes. “Look, solid stone.”

  “Eh? Yes, I suppose so . . . Listen, let’s have a glass of water—it’s been four hours already.”

  “Yes,” Andrei agreed. “Only let’s go down first.”

  They walked down from the hillock and slipped out of their harnesses, and Andrei lugged a red-hot canister out of his cart. The canister caught on the belt of his automatic, then on the sack with the broken remains of the rusks, but Andrei dragged it out anyway, squeezed it between his knees, and opened it. Izya skipped around beside him, holding two plastic mugs at the ready.

  “Get the salt,” said Andrei.

  Izya instantly stopped skipping. “Oh, come on . . .” he whined. “Why? Let’s just down it . . .”

  “You’re not getting any without salt,” Andrei said wearily.

  “Then let’s do it like this,” said Izya, struck by an inspired idea. He had already put down the mugs on a rock and was rummaging in his cart. “Let’s say I eat my salt and then wash it down with the water.”

  “Oh God,” said Andrei, astounded. “OK then, do it that way.” He half-filled the two mugs with hot water that had a metallic smell, took the pack of salt from Izya, and said, “Give me your tongue.”

  He sprinkled a pinch of salt on Izya’s thick, furry tongue and watched Izya wince and choke, reaching out greedily for his mug, then he salted his own water and started drinking it in miserly little sips, without taking any pleasure in it, as if it were medicine.