The room which confronted him resembled a large empty shed. There was a smell of something sour and musty, and the floor was littered with trash: empty medicine bottles, an old boot, a broken guitar without any strings, and scraps of paper. In several places the wallpaper had peeled away from the wall and was hanging down in strips, and the window looked straight out onto a brick wall, no more than a yard away.
Standing in the middle of the room was the princess. Sasha looked at her for a long time, walked around her several times, and then suddenly lashed out at her with his foot. All the junk she was made of tumbled onto the floor and fell apart—the head, made from a dry pumpkin with the eyes and mouth glued on, fell over by the radiator, the cardboard arms crumpled in the sleeves of the long cotton caftan, her right leg fell off while the left slumped to the floor still attached to the waist-length tailor’s dummy and its iron shaft. Sasha left the room and set off back along the corridor, but the portcullis which separated the corridor from the vaulted hall was now lowered. He remembered he had heard it fall a moment after he had kicked at the dummy, but at the time he had paid no attention.
He went back and looked again at the floor and the walls, and spotted the outline of a door that had been papered over. Going over, he pressed against it with his shoulder. The door gave a little, but it didn’t open, though it was obviously very thin. Then Sasha drew back, clenched his fists, took a run and shoulder-charged the door so hard that it burst open. He tore through the wallpaper and hurtled on through the air for a yard or two before he stumbled over something and crashed to the floor, catching a fleeting glimpse as he fell of a pair of shoulders and a head above the back of a chair.
“Careful,” said Itakin, turning away from a flickering screen which showed a high vaulted hall with a princess in the center lying on a carpet and stroking a cat, “you’ll disturb Boris Emelianovich. He’s about to go into battle again. They suffered heavy losses today.”
Sasha raised himself up on his arms and looked around—behind him the door of a cupboard set in the wall stood open and various papers were still slithering out of it onto the floor.
“Well I don’t know, Petya,” he said as he rose to his feet. “What was all that about?”
“You mean the princess?” asked Itakin.
Sasha nodded.
“She was the goal you were striving for all that time,” said Itakin. “I told you, your game’s been cracked.”
“But hasn’t anyone else ever reached her?”
“Of course, lots of people have.”
“Then why didn’t they say anything? So that the others would ... To conceal their own disappointment?”
“I don’t think that’s the reason why. It’s just that when a man spends so much time and effort on a journey and finally gets to its end, he no longer sees everything the way it really is... Although that’s not exactly it either. There is no such thing as the way everything ‘really is.’ Let’s just say he can’t allow himself to see.”
“Then why could I see?”
“Well, you went in by the back staircase.”
“But how is it possible to see something else? And then, I’ve seen her so many times myself—when you move from one level to another she sometimes appears on the screen, but that’s not what she looks like at all!”
“Perhaps I didn’t express myself very well,” said Itakin. “This game is arranged so that only a cartoon prince can reach the princess.”
“Why?”
“Because the princess herself is a cartoon too. And you can draw absolutely anything you like in a cartoon.”
“What happens to the people who are playing? Where does the person controlling the prince go?”
“Do you remember how you got to the twelfth level?” Itakin asked, with a nod at the screen.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell who it was beating his head against the wall and jumping up and down? You or the prince?”
“The prince, of course,” said Sasha. “I can’t jump like that.”
“And where were you all that time?”
Sasha was about to open his mouth and answer, but he stopped short.
“That’s where they go as well,” said Itakin. Sasha sat down on a chair by the wall and thought for a long time.
“Listen,” he said at last, “who is it that plays the flute in there?”
“Nobody’s discovered that yet.”
Sasha glanced at the clock and suddenly hiccuped.
“The shop down at the corner is still open,” he said. “I’ll just get a bottle. Will you wait? Just a glass each, eh?”
“I’m in no hurry,” said Itakin. “You’re the one they won’t let back in.”
“I’ll be quick,” said Sasha, pressing
Game paused
The line in the shop was so long that Sasha realized it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for him to buy a bottle. If he’d been sober, it would definitely have been impossible, but it turned out that he had drunk enough for several minutes of Brownian motion across the crowded shop floor to bring him within a reasonable distance of the cash desk. People leaned on him and swore at him from all sides, but soon Sasha realized that the apparent chaos was actually four lines scraping against each other because they were moving at different speeds. The line for cheap wine was on the left, while the line he had found his way into was for sardines in tomato sauce—the kind that gaze up at you with a dozen beady little eyes as soon as you open the can. Sasha’s line was moving faster than the line for wine, and he decided to move a yard or two forward in his present company and then jump across to the next one. The maneuver was successful, and Sasha found himself sandwiched between a building laborer’s jacket bearing the mysterious inscription “KATEK” on its back, and a brown sports jacket which its wearer, a man of about fifty, was wearing directly over his naked torso.
“Ech-ech-ech...” said the man in the brown sports jacket when Sasha looked at him. A quite unbelievable stench issued from his mouth and Sasha hastily turned away and began staring at the wall, where a triangular pennant of red cloth hung beside a head of Lenin constructed out of painted plywood.
“My God,” he thought. “I actually do live here in this... in this... I’m standing here drunk in a line for cheap fortified wine amongst all these filthy pigs—and I think that I’m a prince!”
“Out of sardines!” shouted frightened voices in the neighboring line.
“No sardines!”
Sasha felt someone behind him tugging at his shoulder.
“What I think,” the man in the sports jacket said, “is that we should withdraw to our ancient territory in Vladimir and Yaroslavl and... and then give the people arms and conquer the whole of Russia all over again.”
“And then?”
“And then we march against the Khan Kuchum,” said the man, waving his fist in Sasha’s face.
“The wine’s running out,” the people began whispering in alarm.
Sasha squeezed himself out of the line and began pushing his way toward the door. He no longer had even the slightest desire to drink. Two women were standing by the door in white coats and caps, glancing at the clock, and discussing something with quiet passion. Suddenly somewhere behind him, up beneath some invisible ceiling which was about three times the height of the shop, he heard a strange sound that instantly began to swell, like dozens of aviation engines all working together. After a few seconds it had become so loud that the people who only a few moments before were peacefully swearing at each other began, first, to stare upwards in astonishment, and then to squat down on their haunches or simply collapse to the floor, blocking their ears with their hands. The sound reached a peak, then just as suddenly began to fade, finally disappearing completely, before being replaced by the
rumbling of tank motors from some other mysterious source, which in turn disappeared just as mysteriously a few seconds later.
“Same thing every evening,” said one of the women in the white coats, “right at a quarter to six. We’ve tried ringing everyone you could think of. Zoya from the Novoarbatsky Supermarket told me it’s the same there too.”
People were picking themselves up from the floor, glowering at each other suspiciously as they tried to remember who had been where in what line. But that didn’t matter now anyway, because the sardines and the wine had both run out. Sasha went out into the street and wandered slowly toward the cheerful electric lights in the windows of the Gosplan building. Ahead of him a body-scissors clicked into action, but from the painful, squeaking way it worked and the large gaps between its bent saw teeth Sasha guessed that it wasn’t from his game—it was just an ordinary Soviet body-scissors, old and inefficient, that someone had either dumped in the street or which was still standing in its appointed place.
He was about to walk past, but following the habit he had acquired in his game, he turned back and looked to see whether there was a jar full of revitalizing liquid just beyond it, as there usually was in the labyrinth. There was no jar, but there were three bottles of fortified wine No. 72 standing there. Sasha walked on, listening to the knocking and squeaking behind his back and picking out in it a few notes, repeated over and over again, from “Midnight in Moscow”—as though a record had gotten stuck on a gramophone and a rusty, hopeless voice kept repeating some eternal question addressed to the dull Moscow sky.
Sasha reached Gosplan and realized that he was too late. The working day was coming to an end and the tall, Assyrian door was disgorging wave upon wave of people into the street. He made an effort to go in anyway, managed a few yards of progress against the current, and was just about to grab hold of the cold railing of the turnstile when he was swept away and carried back out into the street by a group of cheerful women. Kuzma Ulyanovich Staropopikov went slouching by holding his briefcase and Sasha automatically set off after him. Staropopikov turned off into a maze of dark side streets—he obviously lived somewhere close by. Sasha didn’t know why he was following Staropopikov—he just needed something to do, something to hang onto for a while so that he could think in peace.
Ten minutes later—or perhaps it was more, he seemed to have lost all track of time—Staropopikov reached a large deserted yard and headed for the entrance in the corner. Sasha decided that following him any further would be even stupider than following him this far and he was just on the point of turning back when Staropopikov was suddenly confronted by two lanky youths in fashionable NATO jackets. Sasha would have bet any of his extremities that a moment ago they had not been in the yard. Sensing something was wrong, he ducked swiftly behind the fire escape, which was masked with planks right down to the ground—nobody could see him there, even though he was right beside the entrance.
“Are you Kuzma Ulyanovich Staropopikov?” one of the youths asked in a loud voice—he spoke Russian with a strong accent and, like his companion, he had dark curly hair, swarthy skin, and unshaven cheeks.
“Yes,” Staropopikov answered in surprise.
“Did you bomb the camp outside Al-Djegazi?”
Staropopikov shuddered and removed his spectacles.
“And who might you...” he began, but his interlocutor cut him short.
“The Palestine Liberation Organization has condemned you to death,” he said, drawing a long-barreled pistol from his pocket. His companion did the same. Staropopikov jerked back and dropped his briefcase, and an instant later there was a deafening roar of shots followed by the sound of spent shells clattering against the asphalt. The first bullet threw Staropopikov back against the door, but before he fell the Palestinians had emptied the magazines of both their pistols into him, turned on their heels, and hurried away. Sasha was astonished to notice that he could see the trees and benches through them—by the time they reached the corner, they were almost completely invisible and didn’t even seem to make any pretense of turning around it.
An eerie silence fell. Sasha came out from behind the fire escape, looked at Staropopikov, who was quietly rolling to and fro on the pavement, and then glanced around in confusion. A man wearing a tracksuit came out of the next doorway and Sasha dashed toward him as fast as he could run. The man stopped in astonishment and Sasha suddenly felt stupid.
“Didn’t you hear anything just now?” he asked.
“Not a thing. What should I have heard?”
“Nothing—There’s someone in a bad way over there.”
The man finally caught sight of Staropopikov.
“Drunk, probably,” he said, going over and taking a closer look. “But then maybe not. Hey, what’s wrong with you?”
“My heart,” said Staropopikov in a weak voice, pausing between words. “Call an ambulance, I mustn’t move. Or get my wife. Second floor, apartment forty-two.”
“Maybe we should carry you in?”
“No,” said Staropopikov. “I’ve already had two heart attacks. I know what to do.”
The man in the tracksuit dashed up the stairs and Sasha turned and walked quickly away. He wasn’t aware of how he reached the subway and then rode back to the State Supply Building. When he found himself in front of the familiar, friendly five-story building with the columns on its façade, he was already completely sober. Two windows on the third floor were still lit and he decided to go up.
The third floor was empty and dark, and it seemed as though everyone had left already, but there was still someone working in the first timber section. Sasha stepped up to the half-open door and glanced inside through the gap. Boris Grigorievich was standing in the center of the office, dressed in a worn, light-blue kimono and green khakama, with the cap of a fifth-rank official on his head and a fan in his hand. He couldn’t see Sasha out in the dark corridor, but just at the moment when Sasha glanced in, Boris Grigorievich raised his fan above his head, folded and unfolded it, pressed it against his chest, and thrust it out toward Sasha. Then slowly, pulling up one half-bent leg to the other at each small step, he glided toward the door, holding up the open fan with its red silk face turned toward him. It seemed to Sasha that his boss was crying—or howling quietly—but a moment later he made out the poem that he was reciting:
Like to a drop of dew
That gleams a second’s space
Upon the stalk
And flies in vapor
Up to the clouds—
So do not we
Wander all eternity
In darkness?
Oh, hopelessness!
Boris Grigorievich spun around on the spot and froze, with the fan raised high in the air. He stood like that for several minutes and then, as though regaining consciousness, he straightened his jacket, smoothed down his hair, and disappeared into the narrow passageway between the cupboards. Soon Sasha heard a sword whistling through the air and he realized that his boss had begun his usual evening Budokan practice in the second hall to the left after the gates. Then he went in, cleared his throat and called out:
“Boris Grigorievich!”
The whistling of the sword fell silent.
“Lapin?”
“I got everything signed, Boris Grigorievich!”
“Aha. Put it all on the cupboard, I’m busy just now.”
“D’you mind if I do a bit of work, Boris Grigorievich?”
“Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll be here till late today.”
Sasha put the papers on the cupboard, sat at his own desk, and was about to set his finger to the switch that turned on his computer. Then he grinned, took down the telephone book from the shelf above the desk, and leafed through it before pulling the telephone toward him.
“Hello,” he said, “is that the Moscow Housing Construction Office? Is Semyon Prokofievich Chukanov still there? What’s his number?” He wrote down the new number and dialed it immediately.
“Semyon Prokofievich? I’m
calling from Gosplan, on the instructions of Comrade Staropopikov... What’s more important is that he remembers you... As you wish. It’s up to... No, about The Prince. He asked me to let you know how to get directly to the seventh level... I don’t know, perhaps at some meeting in the ministry. I’m sure you’ll be able to remember who saw whom and where, but in the meantime can you write this down... All right, first...”
Sasha unfolded the piece of paper Abbas had given him.
“Enter the words ‘prince megahit seven’. In Latin letters. A Russian ‘N’—no, the number. Not at all, not at all. All the best, now.”
He got up and went out into the corridor for a smoke. When he returned a few minutes later, he dialed the same number again.
“Semyon Prokofievich, please... What—But I was just talking with him. How awful. I’m so sorry.”
Sasha put down the receiver and switched on his monitor.
Level 1
Jumping down from the stone cornice, he set off along the corridor toward the dead end where he had taken all the things he had found. It was a long time now since he had come in here, but everything was just the same—the couch made of broken fragments of stone slabs, covered with old, rotten rags for softness, someone’s shin bone, which he had begun to shape into a cigarette holder and then abandoned, a pair of slim copper jugs, one of which still held some of its contents, and lying on the floor, a State Supply Office form with a plan of the first level, now covered with a thick layer of dust. Sasha lay down on the couch and closed his eyes and almost immediately, from somewhere far, far above him, beyond innumerable ceilings of stone, there came the faint sound of a flute being played. He began remembering the day’s events, but he was too sleepy, and pulling some of the old rags over himself, he found a niche where he was not in a draft and fell asleep.
At first he dreamed of Petya Itakin, sitting on the top of a tower and playing on a long reed flute, and then he dreamed of Abbas, wearing a shimmering green caftan, who explained to Sasha at length that if he pressed the
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 22
