For some reason this was followed by the display stand, “The Life of the Peoples of Our Country Before the Revolution,” a board covered in canvas to which a horseshoe, a yellow horse’s jaw, and a crumpled birch-bark sandal had been attached with wire. Close by, in an illuminated glass box, hung the tiny women’s Brownings that had belonged to Sandel and Mundindel, and beneath them Babayasin’s notched saber, which turned out not to be so very big after all. Everywhere there were photographs of coarse mustachioed faces, and the voice of the Pioneer acting as guide had continuously explained some incomprehensible difference between them. Then the voice had acquired deep, soft, and velvety tones, and began talking about death and describing its various forms, beginning with drowning. Ivan suddenly understood...
III
“I’ll teach you how to talk in front of your mother, you little pup! I’ll give you flaming Mayflies!”
That was Valera shouting behind the wall, and he could hear a child crying.
“Marat, love, hold on,” said a different female voice. “Hold on love, you know Pa’s...”
Ivan turned over onto his back and fixed his gaze on the faint gold glimmer of the pretzel-shaped lamp on the ceiling. It was Valera’s room, and for some reason he was lying on Valera’s bed in his trousers and jacket. But that wasn’t what was bothering him, it was the dream he’d just stopped dreaming.
In the dream he’d found himself in a strange place, a gloomy room with lancet windows that had obviously once been a church but was now filled with old battered skis and sodden boots that gave off the smell of a damp prison. Through the narrow slit of a window he could see a patch of gray sky, and occasional gusts of steam. Ivan himself was sitting on a tiny bench and in front of him an old man with a broad beard covering his chest was sleeping on an immense pile of old felt boots—that was how Parmahamov appeared in this dream, where for some reason he was called Ivan Ilich. Ivan tried to get up but realized he couldn’t because the legs of his new namesake were lying on his shoulders. Ivan also realized that he was dying, and this had less to do with his bruised kidney than with the legs lying on his shoulders. Death would come when Parmahamov woke up.
Ivan tried cautiously removing Parmahamov’s legs from his shoulders and Parmahamov started waking up—he stirred and groaned, even raised one hand a little. Frightened, Ivan stopped moving. The old man began snoring again, but now he was sleeping restlessly, turning his head in his sleep, and it seemed as though he might wake up at any moment. Ivan very much did not want to die—there was something in his life which made it worth bearing the bitter stench of this room, and Parmahamov’s legs on his shoulders, and even the terrible thought that there was nothing at all in the world except this room, a thought which seemed to permeate the air along with the smell of soaking leather.
“There must be some way of getting out of this,” thought Ivan. “There has to be.” And then he noticed that Parmahamov had skis on his feet and their tips reached down to only a little short of the floor. Ivan dragged the bench out from underneath himself and began cautiously stooping down, pressing himself towards the floor. The ends of the skis came to rest on the floor and Ivan sensed that he could creep out from under Parmahamov’s legs. No sooner had he crawled out from underneath them and taken two steps to the side, than his bruised kidney stopped hurting. Then Ivan realized that he wasn’t Ivan at all—the thought didn’t sadden him in the least—and he knew exactly what he had to do. In the wall opposite the lancet window there was a little door. Ivan tiptoed over to it, opened it, squeezed through into a narrow black space, and began feeling his way forward. His hands moved closely over the surface of dusty picture frames, chairs, bicycle handlebars—and then came across a new door ahead of him. Ivan drew breath and pushed against it.
Outside it was a hot sunny day. Ivan was standing in a small yard in which hens and cocks were strutting about. The yard was enclosed by an uneven but sturdy fence, beyond which he could make out rocky orange-colored slopes rising upwards with little blue houses scattered across them. Ivan went over to the fence, grabbed hold of its top and raised his head over it. About three hundred yards away was the sea. And at the edge of the sea a slim white form glinted blindingly in the sunlight... Ivan couldn’t remember anything after that.
“Pulled out of it?” asked Valera, coming into the room.
“Seems like it,” Ivan answered, getting up “What happened to me?”
“Just pushed yourself a bit too hard around the Maypole. They took us to the museum on the fourth floor, and then Parmahamov came down and started telling us how you’d saved someone from drowning, and he wanted to present you with an illustrated book on behalf of the Sovcom. And then you just keeled over. They brought you here in the Sovcom wagon, like a king. Here’s the book.”
Valera held out to Ivan a massive tome with a glossy dust jacket, which Ivan could scarcely keep hold of. My Albania was written in large letters on the cover.
“What is it?”
“Pictures,” answered Valera, “have a look, there’s some interesting ones. At first I thought it would be nothing but a load of dusty museum pieces, but then I had a look and it’s not bad.”
Ivan opened the book and his eye fell on a large, double-page reproduction. It showed a large log with a fat naked man lying on it belly down.
“In search of the internal Pinocchio,” Ivan read off the title. “Only it’s not clear where he’s looking for Pinocchio: in the log or in himself.”
“Seems to me,” answered Valera, “it’s all the same one May or the other.”
Ivan turned the page and suddenly almost dropped the book. What he saw—and immediately recognized—was the enclosed yard with the cocks, hens, and the fence and beyond that the little blue houses with the St. Andrew’s crosses on their shutters climbing up the orange mountain slopes. In the center of the yard a man was sitting on a cracked bench, wearing a military service jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and playing on a small accordion whose case lay open beside him.
“Waiting for the white submarine,” read Ivan, then he snatched up the book and set off back to his own room, without even looking at Valera. He didn’t keep the door key under the doormat like everyone else, but in the pocket of a padded jacket hanging on a nail. Ivan realized now why he’d woken up at Valera’s place; the people who’d brought him home hadn’t been able to open the door.
Everything in the room was just as it had been: the stain from the herrings was there on the tablecloth; the miniature Kremlin made of bottles still stood in front of the wardrobe and, still trying hard to appear nude, the naked woman by the Zaporozhets on the calendar was smiling at the photographer. Ivan collapsed onto the bed and slept.
From the moment his head touched the plastic foam pillow, he began dreaming again. He was standing on a high roof at night and looking down at a city spread out all around him like a jumble of gigantic quartz crystals illuminated from within by thousands of shades of electric light—but he was not in the least afraid that he might fall (in Uran-Bator the tallest building was the five-story Sovcom, but there was no point in even dreaming of getting up there to see the city). Then he was down on the ground, on a broad well-lit street filled with happy, carefree people, and he wasn’t immediately aware that it was nighttime and the light was coming from street lamps and shop windows. The next instant he was hurtling along a road supported on slim columns in a quietly growling car with blue, red, and orange numbers and lines flashing on the dashboard in front of him. Then he was at a table in a restaurant, surrounded by several people in familiar military uniform, and on the table, among an incredible display of glasses and bottles, lay several packs of Winston.
“A-a-agh!” Ivan howled as he awoke, “a-a-a-gh!”
The strange dream crumbled and disappeared. When Ivan opened his eyes he was in the familiar room and outside the dark window a guitar was jangling in the usual fashion. His recollection of the shock he had suffered remained unclear; he couldn’t remember what was wrong a
t all. But he was afraid to stay in bed—he got up and began pacing nervously across the painted floorboards. He had to do something to occupy his mind.
“Maybe I should tidy up the room?” he thought. “This is really frightening, I feel like I’m going nuts, I feel totally witless, witless”—he repeated it to himself several times, feeling something inside him rising up in response to the word. The strange sensation gradually passed. He took a look around and decided to start with the bottles. “It was something very odd,” he recalled, opening the window and looking out and down into the trash strewn yard, “something about an accordion.”
The yard was empty, except for the far end by the swings and the sandpit, where he could make out the lit ends of cigarettes. The children had long ago all gone home, and he could throw his garbage straight out the window, onto the pile, without worrying about hurting anyone. Ivan threw out a few bottles, a few seconds went by, and then he heard an unimaginably piercing feline screech that was immediately answered by jolly catcalls from the direction of the swings and the sandpit.
“Keep up that labor initiative, get that Partcom up your Kollontai!” shouted Valera’s drunken voice; some women began giggling. “We’re going to give all tomcats a triple Central Committee May Day with bells and whistles!”
“Whistles,” repeated Ivan, “witless... whistles... Winston...” He suddenly drew back from the window and clutched his head in his hands—he felt as though he had been struck in the face with a plank.
“My God!” he whispered, then repeated the phrase in English, “My God! How could I have forgotten?”
He dashed over to the wardrobe, pushing aside the remaining bottles which went rolling across the floor, some of them breaking—and flung open its doors. Inside stood a tattered accordion case. Ivan pulled it out, carried it over to the bed, clicked open the locks, opened the lid, and laid his palms on the rough panel of the transmitter. One palm crept to the right, felt its way into another section and found the cold handle of a pistol; the other found a package containing money and maps.
“My God,” he whispered again, “I forgot all about it, everything. If that thing hadn’t smacked me in the back, I’d be drinking with them now... And tomorrow, as well.”
He stood up and strode around the room again, running his fingers through his hair. Then he sat back down, pulled the open accordion case toward him and switched on the transmitter. Two eyes, one green and one yellow, seemed to open and gaze out at him.
IV
The next morning Ivan was woken by music. His first sensation on waking was terror at the thought that he had forgotten everything. Leaping to his feet, he was about to dash over to the wardrobe, but he sighed in relief at the certainty that he could remember. The note in pencil on the wallpaper: “FIRST THING IN THE MORNING REMEMBER TO PLAY THE ACCORDION” was superfluous after all. He even found it rather funny and was ashamed of the fear he had felt the previous day. Ivan turned over onto his back, set his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Through the window he heard another stream of slushy wind instrument music, as if the soloists’ thick fatty voices were being stirred into a melody to produce something like a thin soup.
“Why all the music?” wondered Ivan, and then he remembered: today was a holiday, Bulldozer Driver’s Day. Demonstrations, cabbage pies, and all the rest of it—perhaps it would be easier to leave the city during the drunken uproar. He could sing a farewell song with everyone else at the Babayasin monument on the way to the station. There was a knock at the door.
“Ivan!” Valera shouted from the corridor, “are you up yet?”
Ivan muttered something loudly, trying not to invest the sounds with any meaning.
“Okay,” Valera answered, and trudged off down the corridor in his massive boots.
“He’s gone to the demonstration,” Ivan realized. He turned to face the wall and became thoughtful as he gazed at the pimply projections on the wallpaper. After a while the happy holiday sounds of building work and subdued banter fell silent in the yard and it became absolutely quiet. Ivan got up, made his bed quickly, and began gathering his things. Putting on his special holiday work jacket with the white nitrolacquer Levi’s inscription and the Adidas artificial leather hood, he looked himself over carefully in the mirror. Everything seemed to be fine, but just in case Ivan released a long blond forelock from under his cap, then took an artificial sunflower seed husk out of the accordion case and glued it to his chin.
“That’s just perfect,” he thought, picked up the case and took a farewell look around his room. Taking his leave was not difficult.
Downstairs by the door Valera was leaning against the wall and smoking. Just like Ivan, he was wearing his special holiday padded jacket, but his was a Wrangler. Ivan hadn’t been expecting to meet him here—he was quite startled.
“Right then,” said Valera good-naturedly, “slept it off all right?”
“Ughu,” answered Ivan. “I thought you were going off with the column?”
“Oh, come on, flaming peaceful May. You yelled through the door for me to wait. Are you completely crocked or what?”
“All right, to May with it,” Ivan said vaguely. “Where shall we go then?”
“Where else. To Petya’s place. We’ll sit for a while with our own buddies.”
“That means Maypoling it all the way through town,” said Ivan, “past the Sovcom.”
“We’ll walk it, it won’t be the first time.”
Ivan trudged off after Valera along the empty and depressing street. Nobody was around, but from somewhere in the distance they could hear the sounds of a wind orchestra, now including the sharp, particularly unpleasant sound of cymbals, which had previously been filtered out by the window. The street merged into another, which in turn merged into a third, and the music grew louder and louder until finally it drowned out the scraping of the two men’s boots on the asphalt from Ivan’s hearing. Turning one more corner they saw a raised dais upholstered with red cloth, and standing on it a singer with an incredibly ruddy face; he was gesturing to the crowd, moving his arms out from his chest and although his mouth was wide open, in some cunning fashion he managed to smile as if astonished that he was giving away his art to the people so simply. At the same moment he came into view, they heard the words of the song:
My own free land, my beaming nation
Glows bright as nuclear radiation.
At this point their view of the singer was obstructed by another corner, and the music once more became a sticky porridge of wind instruments and baritone. Ahead of them Ivan and Valera caught sight of the tail end of the column making its way to the center of the city, and they quickened their step in order to fall in with the others. He caught a glimpse of Osmakov, looking gloomy with the collar of his raincoat freshly washed, and the smiling Altynina, wearing a ribbon in a bow; they were standing to one side of the stream of people, in a small side street, beside a group of horses harnessed to a huge mobile propaganda display shaped like a bulldozer.
They soon came out into the square in front of the Sovcom. The monument to Sandel, Mundindel, and Babayasin was decorated with paper orchids which were now sodden and heavy with rain. A ballbearing race had been set on the point of the saber raised high above the head of the bronze Babayasin, with hooks set in its outer ring. Festive red ribbons dangled down from the hooks, into the clutching left hands of twenty or so of the city’s most active party members. They were all dressed in identical brown waterproof raincoats and caps covered with gleaming raindrops, and they were walking in a circle, around and around the monument, so that if anybody had been watching from above, what they would have seen was something like a reddish-brown toothed cogwheel slowly rotating in the very center of the square. Other living cogwheels, made up of people holding hands, regulated themselves around the movement of the main group. Ivan and Valera shifted from one foot to the other as they waited for their column to form into a long loop in order to file past the central cogwheel. They had to wait
for a long time—the leadership had grown very tired since the morning and was now rotating much less rapidly.
“Valera,” asked Ivan, “why’s it all different this time?”
“Haven’t you listened to the radio recently? They’ve improved the transmission. There’s going to be a new model of bulldozer.”
Valera apprehensively rubbed a finger over the white letters on his padded jacket to make sure they weren’t smudging—it had been known to happen. Finally there were only a few people in front of them and Ivan and Valera joined hands and linked up with their neighbors, slipped between a pair of cops, and were carried towards the center of the square.
The handshake passed off almost without a hitch, apart from the fact that Ivan forgot to shift the accordion case from his right hand to his left, so that he had to linger for a moment in front of the monument. The hand he shook belonged to the editor of Red Half-Life, Colonel Kozheurov, but Valera had to be satisfied with the wet artificial limb of the head of the Sovcom’s Department of Culture. Valera was upset by this, and when they had left Sandel Square behind them and the people had fallen neatly back into a column, he turned back and waved his fist threateningly at the retreating gray façade with the huge red letters spelling out “PEACE, LABOR, MAY.”
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 16
