Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

  “What do you want?” Persikov asked menacingly, pulling off his overcoat with Pankrat’s help. But the derby quickly pacified Persikov, whispering in the tenderest voice that the professor had no cause to be upset. He, the derby, was there for precisely the purpose of protecting the professor from any importunate visitors; the professor could set his mind at ease with regard not only to the doors of his study, but even to the windows. Upon which the stranger turned over the lapel of his suit coat for a moment and showed the professor a certain badge.

  “Hm … how about that, you’ve really got things well set up,” Persikov mumbled, and added naively, “and what will you eat here?”

  At this the derby grinned and explained that he would be relieved.

  The three days after this went by splendidly. The professor had two visits from the Kremlin, and one from students whom he gave examinations. Every last one of the students flunked, and from their faces it was clear that Persikov now inspired only superstitious awe in them.

  “Go get jobs as trolleycar conductors! You aren’t fit to study zoology,” came from the office.

  “Strict, eh?” the derby asked Pankrat.

  “Ooh, a holy terror,” answered Pankrat, “even if someone passes, he comes out reeling, poor soul. He’ll be dripping with sweat. And he heads straight for a beer hall …”

  Engrossed in these minor chores, the professor did not notice the three days pass; but on the fourth day he was recalled to reality again, and the cause of this was a thin, squeaky voice from the street. “Vladimir Ipatievich!” the voice screeched from Herzen Street into the open window of the office.

  The voice was in luck: the last few days had exhausted Persikov. Just at the moment he was resting in his armchair, smoking, and staring languidly and feebly with his red-circled eyes. He could not go on. And therefore it was even with some curiosity that he looked out the window and saw Alfred Bronsky on the sidewalk. The professor immediately recognized the titled owner of the calling card by his pointed hat and notebook. Bronsky bowed to the window tenderly and deferentially.

  “Oh, is it you?” the professor asked. He did not have enough energy left to get angry, and he was even curious to see what would happen next. Protected by the window, he felt safe from Alfred. The ever-present derby in the street instantly cocked an ear toward Bronsky. A most disarming smile blossomed on the latter’s face.

  “Just a pair of minutes, dear professor,” Bronsky said, straining his voice from the sidewalk. “Only one small question, a purely zoological one. May I ask it?”

  “Ask it,” Persikov replied laconically and ironically, and he thought to himself, “After all, there is something American in this rascal.”

  “What do you have to say as for the hens, dear professor?” shouted Bronsky, folding his hands into a trumpet.

  Persikov was nonplussed. He sat down on the windowsill, then got up, pressed a button, and shouted, poking his finger toward the window,

  “Pankrat, let that fellow on the sidewalk in.”

  When Bronsky appeared in the office Persikov extended his amiability to the extent of barking, “Sit down!” at him.

  And Bronsky, smiling ecstatically, sat down on the revolving stool.

  “Please explain something to me,” began Persikov. “Do you write there—for those papers of yours?”

  “Yes, sir,” Alfred replied deferentially.

  “Well, it’s incomprehensible to me, how you can write when you don’t even know how to speak Russian correctly. What is this ‘a pair of minutes’ and ‘as for the hens’? You probably meant to ask ‘about the hens’?”

  Bronsky burst out into a thin and respectful laugh. “Valentin Petrovich corrects it.”

  “Who’s this Valentin Petrovich?”

  “The head of the literary department.”

  “Well, all right. Besides, I am not a philologist. Let’s forget your Petrovich. What is it specifically that you wish to know about hens?”

  “In general everything you have to tell, professor.”

  Here Bronsky armed himself with a pencil. Triumphant sparks flickered in Persikov’s eyes.

  “You come to me in vain; I am not a specialist on the feathered beasts.

  You would be best off to go to Emelian Ivanovich Portugalov of the First University. I myself know extremely little.”

  Bronsky smiled ecstatically, giving him to understand that he understood the dear professor’s joke. “Joke: little,” he jotted in his notebook.

  “However, if it interests you, very well. Hens, or pectinates … Order, Gallinae. Of the pheasant family …” Persikov began in a loud voice, looking not at Bronsky, but somewhere beyond him, where a thousand people were presumably listening, “of the pheasant family, Phasianidae. They are birds with fleshy combs and two lobes under the lower jaw … hm … although sometimes there is only one in the center of the chin … Well, what else? Wings, short and rounded. Tails of medium length, somewhat serrated, even, I would say, denticulated, the middle feathers crescent shaped … Pankrat, bring me Model No. 705 from the model cabinet—a cock in cross section … but no, you have no need of that? Pankrat, don’t bring the model … I reiterate to you, I am not a specialist—go to Portugalov. Well, I personally am acquainted with six species of wild hens—hm … Portugalov knows more—in India and the Malay Archipelago. For example, the Banki rooster, or Kazintu, found in the foothills of the Himalayas, all over India, in Assam and Burma … Then there’s the swallow-tailed rooster, or Gallus varius, of Lombok, Sumbawa, and Flores. On the island of Java there is a remarkable rooster, Gallus eneus; in southeast India, I can recommend the very beautiful Gallus souneratti to you. As for Ceylon, there we meet the Stanley rooster, not found anywhere else.”

  Bronsky sat there, his eyes bulging, scribbling.

  “Anything else I can tell you?”

  “I would like to know something about chicken diseases,” Alfred whispered very softly.

  “Hm, I’m not a specialist, you ask Portugalov … Still, and all … well, there are tapeworms, flukes, scab mites, red mange, chicken mites, poultry lice or Mallophaga, fleas, chicken cholera, croupous-diphtheritic inflammation of the mucous membranes … pneumonomycosis, tuberculosis, chicken mange—there are all sorts of diseases.” There were sparks leaping in Persikov’s eyes. “There can be poisoning, tumors, rickets, jaundice, rheumatism, the Achorion schoenleinii fungus … a quite interesting disease. When it breaks out little spots resembling mold form on the comb.”

  Bronsky wiped the sweat from his forehead with a colored handkerchief. “And what, professor, in your opinion is the cause of the present catastrophe?”

  “What catastrophe?”

  “What, you mean you haven’t read it, professor?” Bronsky cried with surprise, and pulled out a crumpled page of Izvestia from his briefcase.

  “I don’t read newspapers,” answered Persikov, grimacing.

  “But why, professor?” Alfred asked tenderly.

  “Because they write gibberish,” Persikov answered, without thinking.

  “But how about this, professor?” Bronsky whispered softly, and he unfolded the newspaper.

  “What’s this?” asked Persikov, and he got up from his place. Now the sparks began to leap in Bronsky’s eyes. With a pointed lacquered nail he underlined a headline of incredible magnitude across the entire page:

  CHICKEN PLAGUE IN THE REPUBLIC

  “What?” Persikov asked, pushing his spectacles onto his forehead.

  VI. MOSCOW IN JUNE OF 1928

  She gleamed brightly, her lights danced, blinked, and flared on again. The white headlights of buses and the green lights of trolleys circled around Theater Square; over the former Muir and Merilis, above the tenth floor built up over it, a multicolored electric woman was jumping up and down, making up multicolored words letter by letter: WORKERS CREDIT. In the square opposite the Bolshoi, around the multicolored fountain shooting up sprays all night, a crowd was milling and rumbling. And over the Bolshoi a giant loudspeake
r was booming: “The anti-chicken vaccinations at the Lefort Veterinary Institute have produced excellent results. The number … of chicken deaths for the day declined by half.”

  Then the loudspeaker changed its timbre, something rumbled in it; over the theater a green stream flashed on and off, and the loudspeaker complained in a deep bass: “Special commission set up to combat chicken plague, consisting of the People’s Commissar of Public Health, the People’s Commissar of Agriculture, the Chief of Animal Husbandry, Comrade Avis-Hamska, Professors Persikov and Portugalov, and Comrade Rabinovich! … New attempts at intervention,” the speaker cachinnated and wept like a jackal, “in connection with the chicken plague!”

  Theater Lane, Neglinny Prospect, and the Lubianka flamed with white and violet streaks, spraying shafts of light, howling with horns, and whirling with dust. Crowds of people pressed against the wall by the huge pages of advertisements lit by garish red reflectors.

  “Under threat of the most severe penalties, the populace is forbidden to employ chicken meat or eggs as food. Private tradesmen who attempt to sell these in the markets will be subject to criminal prosecution and confiscation of all property. All citizens who own eggs must immediately surrender them at their local police precincts.”

  On the roof of The Worker’s Gazette chickens were piled skyhigh on the screen, and greenish firemen, quivering and sparkling, were pouring kerosene on them with long hoses. Then red waves swept across the screen; unreal smoke billowed, tossed about like rags, and crept along in streams, and fiery words leaped out: “BURNING OF CHICKEN CORPSES ON THE KHODYNKA.”

  Among the wildly blazing show windows of the stores which worked until three in the morning (with breaks for lunch and supper) gaped the blind holes of windows boarded up under their signs: “Egg Store. Quality Guaranteed.” Very often, screaming alarmingly, passing lumbering buses, hissing cars marked “MOSHEALDEPART FIRST AID” swept past the traffic policemen.

  “Someone else has stuffed himself with rotten eggs,” the crowd murmured.

  On the Petrovsky Lines the world-renowned Empire Restaurant glittered with its green and orange lights, and on its tables, next to the portable telephones, stood cardboard signs stained with liqueurs: “By decree—no omelettes. Fresh oysters have been received.” At the Ermitage, where tiny Chinese lanterns, like beads, glowed mournfully amid the artificial, cozy greenery, the singers Shrams and Karmanchikov on the eye-shattering, dazzling stage sang ditties composed by the poets Ardo and Arguiev:

  Oh, Mamma, what will I do without eggs?

  while their feet thundered out a tap dance.

  Over the theater of the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as everyone knows, in 1927, during the staging of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov when a plat-form full of naked boiars collapsed on him, there flashed a moving multicolored neon sign promulgating the writer Erendorg’s play, Chicken Croak, produced by Meyerhold’s disciple, Honored Director of the Republic Kukhterman. Next door, at the Aquarium Restaurant, scintillating with neon signs and flashing with half-naked female bodies to thunderous applause, the writer Lazer’s review entitled The Hen’s Children was being played amid the greenery of the stage. And down Tverskaia, with lanterns on either side of their heads, marched a procession of circus donkeys carrying gleaming placards. Rostand’s Chantecler was being revived at the Korsh Theater.

  Little newsboys were howling and screaming among the wheels of the automobiles: “Nightmarish discovery in a cave! Poland preparing for nightmarish war! Professor Persikov’s nightmarish experiments!”

  At the circus of the former Nikitin, in the greasy brown arena that smelled pleasantly of manure, the dead-white clown Bom was saying to Bim, who was dressed in a huge checkered sack, “I know why you’re so sad!”

  “Vhy-y?” squeaked Bim.

  “You buried your eggs in the ground, and the police from the fifteenth precinct found them.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha,” the circus laughed, so that the blood stopped in the veins joyfully and anguishingly—and the trapezes and the cobwebs under the shabby cupola swayed dizzily.

  “Oop!” the clowns cried piercingly, and a sleek white horse carried out on its back a woman of incredible beauty, with shapely legs in scarlet tights.

  Looking at no one, noticing no one, not responding to the nudging and soft and tender enticements of prostitutes, Persikov, inspired and lonely, crowned with sudden fame, was making his way along Mokhovaia toward the fiery clock at the Manège. Here, without looking around at all, engrossed in his thoughts, he bumped into a strange, old-fashioned man, painfully jamming his fingers directly against the wooden holster of a revolver hanging from the man’s belt.

  “Oh, damn!” squeaked Persikov. “Excuse me.”

  “Of course,” answered the stranger in an unpleasant voice, and somehow they disentangled themselves in the middle of this human logjam. And heading for Prechistenka the professor instantly forgot the collision.

  VII. FEIT

  It is not known whether the Lefort Veterinary Institute’s inoculations really were any good, whether the Samara roadblock detachments were skillful, whether the stringent measures taken with regard to the egg salesmen in Kaluga and Voronezh were successful, or whether the Extraordinary Commission in Moscow worked efficiently, but it is well known that two weeks after Persikov’s last interview with Alfred, in a chicken way things had already been completely cleaned up in the Union of Republics. Here and there forlorn feathers still lay about in the backyards of district towns, bringing tears to the eyes of the onlookers, and in hospitals the last of the greedy people were still finishing the last spasms of bloody diarrhea and vomiting. Fortunately, human deaths were no more than a thousand in the entire Republic. Nor did any serious disorders ensue. True, a prophet had appeared briefly in Volokolamsk, proclaiming that the chicken plague had been caused by none other than the commissars, but he had no special success. In the Volokolamsk marketplace several policemen who had been confiscating chickens from the market women were beaten up, and some windows were broken in the local post and telegraph office. Luckily, the efficient Volokolamsk authorities quickly took the necessary measures as a result of which, first, the prophet ceased his activities, and second, the post office’s broken windows were replaced.

  Having reached Archangel and Syumkin village in the North, the plague stopped by itself, for the reason that there was nowhere for it to go—as everybody knows, there are no hens in the White Sea. It also stopped at Vladivostok, for there only the ocean is beyond that. In the far South it disappeared, petering out somewhere in the parched expanses of Ordubat, Dzhulfa, and Karabulak; and in the West it halted in an astonishing way exactly on the Polish and Rumanian borders. Perhaps the climate of these countries is different or perhaps the quarantine measures taken by the neighboring governments worked, but the fact remains that the plague went no further. The foreign press noisily and avidly discussed the unprecedented losses, while the government of the Soviet Republics, without any noise, was working tirelessly. The Special Commission to Fight the Chicken Plague was renamed the Special Commission for the Revival and Reestablishment of Chicken Breeding in the Republic and was augmented by a new Special Troika, made up of sixteen members. A “Goodpoul” office was set up, with Persikov and Portugalov as honorary assistants to the chairman. Their pictures appeared in the newspapers over titles such as “Mass Purchase of Eggs Abroad” and “Mr. Hughes Wants to Undermine the Egg Campaign.” All Moscow read the stinging feuilleton by the journalist Kolechkin, which closed with the words, “Don’t whet your teeth on our eggs, Mr. Hughes—you have your own!”

  Professor Persikov was completely exhausted from overworking himself for the last three weeks. The chicken events disrupted his routine and put a double burden upon him. Every evening he had to work at conferences of chicken commissions, and from time to time he was obliged to endure long interviews either with Alfred Bronsky or with the mechanical fat man. He had to work with Professor Portugalov and Assistant Professors Ivanov and Bornhart,
dissecting and microscoping chickens in search of the plague bacillus, and he even had to write up a hasty pamphlet “On the Changes in Chicken Kidneys as a Result of the Plague” in three evenings.

  Persikov worked in the chicken field with no special enthusiasm, and understandably so—his whole mind was filled with something else which was fundamental and important—the problem from which he had been diverted by the chicken catastrophe, i.e., the red ray. Straining still further his already shaken health, stealing hours from sleep and meals, sometimes falling asleep on the oilcloth couch in his institute office, instead of going home to Prechistenka, Persikov spent whole nights puttering with his chamber and his microscope.

  By the end of July the race let up a little. The work of the renamed commission fell into a normal groove, and Persikov returned to his interrupted work. The microscopes were loaded with new cultures, and under the ray in the chamber fish and frog roe matured with fantastic speed. Specially ordered glass was brought from Konigsberg by plane, and during the last days of July mechanics laboring under Ivanov’s supervision constructed two large new chambers in which the ray reached the width of a cigarette pack at its source and at its widest point—a full meter. Persikov joyfully rubbed his hands and started to prepare for some sort of mysterious and complicated experiments. To start with he talked to the People’s Commission of Education on the telephone, and the receiver quacked out the warmest assurances of all possible cooperation, and then Persikov telephoned Comrade Avis-Hamska, the director of the Animal Husbandry Department of the Supreme Commission. Persikov received Avis-Hamska’s warmest attention. The matter involved a large order abroad for Professor Persikov. Avis said into the telephone that he would immediately wire Berlin and New York. After this there was an inquiry from the Kremlin about how Persikov’s work was progressing, and an important and affable voice asked whether Persikov needed an automobile.

  “No, thank you, I prefer to ride the trolley,” replied Persikov.