The orderly stepped back inside and bent down over the sheepskin:
“Get up, father. This is Nikonovka.”
Under the sheepskin all was quiet.
The orderly reached under the coat and felt a cold bony shoulder:
“Nikonovka. Your stop. Hear me?”
Several heels shivered and drew in under the broadcloth: “Who’s makin’ us freeze? The door, shut the door.” Then a hoarse voice from a top bunk:
“What’s going on?”
“Comrade commander,” the orderly stood to attention, “allow me to report that on my watch the old priest died.”
A quarter of an hour later the corpse had been handed over to the stationmaster at Nikonovka. The lantern waved through the gray air. A soft clank ran from buffer to buffer. The cage continued on its way.
6
Stage by stage the train was nearing the war zone. Sticking up out of the snowy fields now here, now there, were the charred skeletons of dead villages. The train advanced without lights or whistles. The songs inside the red boxcars had ceased. The men sat up or slept without taking off their equipment.
Then suddenly, just before sunset, when the sky was burning as if set alight, from around a bend three hundred paces off, came the rapid rat-a-tat of machine guns interspersed with rifle fire. Instantly bullets were battering the wheels.
With a spiteful howl, the engine kicked the train, trying to back up, but was blocked by a salvo, while the telephone receiver slung across the tender barked: Stop! Boxcar doors rumbled open, men tumbled quickly out in a line. They must hurry to meet death. The cage, standing amid the commotion of forty pairs of feet, was knocked closer and closer to the edge, one more knock—and the cage lay on its round side; a chance rifle butt struck the bars, propelling the cage, which, with a shrill avian shriek, hit the snow’s icy crust and went rolling down the gently sloping embankment. It had to transfer.
7
A trackwalker, poking crossties with a stick, was making his rounds. Striding along the embankment, he suddenly heard from somewhere below a guttural: “Platoon, fire!”
As if cut down by a reflex, the trackman fell to the ground and froze. But the field was silent. And a second later he realized that a volley had nowhere to come from—the flat snowy expanse beside the tracks was deserted. The trackman got to his knees and peeked over the edge of the embankment. Fifteen or twenty feet from him, caught halfway down the slope on a leafless shrub, lay a strange object: it reminded him of a creel at first, then a cage. Puzzled, the trackman got up off his knees and a minute later was examining the bizarre green-blue-gray gaudy lump which, stiff wings bristling behind ice-coated bars, continued to whistle and drone: “Platooonn, fire, fire, fire, pla . . .”
With a wary smile, the trackman lifted the cage up, then covered it with a flap of his sheepskin coat against the wind, and soon the ice on the bars was melting in his warm lodge, dripping tearful staccato drops on the clay floor.
Several more months went by. The bullets that long populated the air had left it empty for breathing. Life, and therefore trains too, again began to run on schedule. Past the numbered lodge time whirled regularly, marking off the predetermined hours and minutes with the whistles of locomotives. Next to the blue-green-and-red bird, sticking out of leather holders, were green and red flags. The parrot learned to imitate the whistle of steam forced through an iron crack, and once, when, due to snowdrifts, the mail train was late, the bird whistled a high strident note in reproach, as if to recall the disrupted minutes. The trackman merely wagged his head: “You oughtta be head of maintenance—with a cage ’stead of an office.”
Everything was clear and becoming clearer by the day, except the murky liquid in the never-dry bottle that was the lodge’s third inmate. The murk, flowing from glass to man, screamed lamentations and abuse from him, spun the walls round his eyes, pitched his head into his palms and down onto the table.
“Listen t’ me, you son of a bird . . .” so his confession began every evening, words wafting on the raw vodka, and went on about how he was taught not by the book, but by the rod, and how, barely knee-high, he’d left home for the road, become a tramp, seen the world: ’stead of crosses—crossroads, ’stead of . . .
The parrot, head tucked in its bristly blue-gray collar, listened with the look of a legal consultant, who, seated before a confused and long-winded client stating his case, peers past him at those next in line, their stories, equally weak and vague, patiently waiting their turn.
The bottle, a leech on the trackman’s meager income, sucked up his wages and demanded more. The trackman first drank away his spare boots, then his government-issue jacket with the brass buttons, and finally it came time for the cage: swapped for a hundred gulps of rotgut, the parrot moved into a log hut in an unprepossessing village that sent up some thirty columns of lilac-gray smoke.
8
The cage stood in the corner on a bench; from below, from the tamped-earth floor, protruded the wooden belly of a tub; its cracks gave off a sour smell; from behind the plump whitewashed stove a cricket chirped; this was an illiterate country cricket who had never heard of Dickens* and sang only about how the hotter the coals, the wider the crack, but the wider the crack, the colder it was.
This log hut, like all its hut-neighbors, led a narrow-minded life, hard and sluggish as a forest road. Under the low lintel, along with the mud that stuck to their soles, words looked in, dense and sticky as damp clay. Sometimes on the table, by a breath-swayed flame sharp as an ace of spades, lay a newspaper from which a monotonous labored voice, bending the words at the joints, dragged sluggish lines. Listeners, ears and furrowed brows tilted toward the syllables, remained silent. The cage, too, said not a word.
Several weeks went by, and the cage, tethered to sacks of potatoes and a clucking bouquet of chickens bound up by their stem-like feet, was bumping in a cart down a rutted road to town, to market.
Again the dazzle and din of the throng squeezed through the bars of the cage: the “how much” wandering among carts; women’s bright headscarves; hawkers’ calls and boasts; the crunch of hay in horses’ bitted mouths; shrieks of “Stop, thief!”; the copper clangor from a decrepit belfry.
Soon the market, axles creaking, had trundled away, leaving nothing on Marx-and-Engels, the former Cathedral Square,* but the marks of wheel rims, smashed potsherds, tufts of hay, and tango-colored droppings.
And also: inside a tearoom door open to the empty square, next to the snub-nosed teapots poking out from the shelves, the sickle-shaped beak of a parrot. The clink of china on the counter—husks of words and sunflower seeds—steam blown away by funnel-like mouths—the jabber of voices—the drone of fat flies.
But the bird’s silence was hardly entertaining. And when the peasant who had palmed off the cage came by the tearoom on the next market day, he saw neither cage, nor parrot.
Meanwhile, at a landing stage on the Volga, bored passengers waiting for the steamboat’s hoot had gathered round a wooden box of five-kopeck fortunes. They were drawn less by the fortunes than by the disheveled bird on the lid of the box: it sat there, wings tiredly hunched, with the look of an atheist selling indulgences; whenever the box’s owner nudged the bird, prompting it to produce a slip of paper, the parrot—to general laughter—would screech: “Boiling water, hottest there is, boil . . .”
9
In the old days Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky occupied an apartment of eleven chambers; after that he lived in six spacious rooms; then he lodged in two rooms with a kitchen; after that he was cooped up in one small room with one Primus; now he was living out his life behind a makeshift partition in half of a tiny room* where even the sun, for lack of a window, did not know how to get in. Beginning with this half-room, everything about Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky is somehow half: when asked his age, he points to the tangle of gray and black threads above his brow, and says slyly: “If put to a vote, some are ‘for’, others ‘against’—take a count, and let the majority rule.
Ha!” Gleb Borisovich is not lean and not stout, not nearsighted and not farsighted, not wise, but also not unwise; in the evening, shut up in his half-room, he half-drinks: into a small glass half-filled with vodka he dips, then nibbles, slivers of bread, nibbles then dips to his own monotonous mutterings: “Boris and Gleb,* Glebel the rebel . . .”
Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky is an attentive frequenter of auctions, department store sales, flea markets, book markets, and markets in general. With the expression of a man listening to a symphony, he eyes the monogrammed crystal plunging into the crowd; the upward ruble climb of framed nudes, stockings, and flasks with foreign wax seals; the antique armchair with frayed elbow-rests which, having clambered up onto the dais, is now, unbought and abashed, backing away on bent legs. Here too Gleb Borisovich asks the price, but does not bargain, or if he bargains, does not buy. Sometimes, standing by a bookstall, he leafs at length through a book, gradually losing himself in the thicket of lines, but then, having read to the endpaper price, puts the book carefully back and walks off.
So today too had begun. Under a festive yellow sun heaps of former things* streamed out of gates and archways to the market square: settees covered in balding plush on rickety bamboo legs; mournful icons under dark layers of ancient varnish; prayers hiding inside bindings and under outworn clasps; moth-eaten stuffs; etchings with yellowed edges; sleepy pages from frail books steeped in time’s bile; and finally, in a narrow lane tapering away from the square, like a river from a lake, atop the cobbled waves: all manner of broken bric-a-brac: an enamel-stemmed goblet with a chipped foot; a six-armed candelabrum minus a pair; a carved gold frame embracing a four-cornered emptiness; a beaded wall slipper; a needle-pocked darning mushroom; the bell-mouth of a gramophone suffering from laryngeal consumption; an album whose loose now-empty cardboard slots once received countless portraits of three generations.
Gleb Borisovich, as usual, was ambling about among the outspread tarpaulins and bast mats, surveying the motley slave market of things. He touched the glass pendants of a chandelier seemingly fallen from an invisible ceiling at the feet of appraisers—and instantly the facets spattered the seven-colored spectrum. Bending over an engraving, “The Death of Epaminondas,”* he examined the spear sticking out of the gray wound, and even asked, “How much?” He considered a clock’s rusty pendulum, its “ticktocklessness,” twisted his mustache with a smile—and entered the shadow-draped lane.
Through a gilt frame leaning against a spur stone* like an absurd still life, the stopped galoshes and cane of a passerby showed black. And then—through the crackly cough of a gramophone horn—a nasal voice whined:
“Mister, buy my Polly.”
The whine was coming from somewhere under his elbow. Gleb Borisovich drew his arm aside and saw—at the level of his coat pocket—an upturned cuttlefish-like mouth, upper lip hidden by a large visor.
“Misbuymypoll . . .” the small boy drawled, clutching with all ten fingers a bent-beaked, bright-feathered bird.
Gleb Borisovich touched the parrot’s yellow-and-green crest:
“How much?”
“Three rubles.”
“Oho!”—jerking his pocket away from the waif, Gleb Borisovich passed on. He had already turned the corner and left the market behind when suddenly he heard the staccato patter of footsteps catching up with him. He looked round—the boy with the parrot was running after him, yelping from under his visor:
“One ruble! One!”
That was, of course, cheap. But to what end? So as to shake the boy off, he called back:
“Fifty kopecks.”
But before Gleb Borisovich could press his long-legged advantage, he had been overtaken:
“Here.”
Two fifteen-kopeck coins plus a twenty-kopeck one sprang down from his palm, while on his proffered finger there now flapped two wings and a fanned tail. A somewhat bewildered Gleb Borisovich tried to peek under the bird’s sheaths. Why on earth. A man walking by burst into loud laughter. The urchin-seller had vanished into thin air. Gleb Borisovich, turning angry, shook his finger and said, “Shoo!” But the viselike grip would not release his finger, and the bird, despite a wobble, did not even open its eyes. “Humph,” thought Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky and he carried his inadvertent purchase home on an outstretched hand.
•
All he had to do was remove six issues of Print and Revolution* from the shelf above the table, replace them with a tin box brimful of sand—and the parrot had a corner of its own; then it was just a matter of attaching one ring to a scaly foot, another to a nail, and the installation of this exotic tenant was essentially complete.
Gleb Borisovich slipped off his jacket, unlaced his shoes and lay down to rest, squinting with sleepy eyes at the gaudy blotch against the book bindings. The bird’s plumage seemed to lend the twenty-candle-power bulb screwed into the ceiling a certain brightness and lambency. “Well, why not?” thought he . . .
Through the wall pressed to the back of his head, a sewing machine chirred. Through the wall hard by the crown of his head, a stubborn finger was roaming across cracked piano keys in the vicinity of “The Internationale.”* The white canopy of ceiling shuddered under pattering heels. Behind his closed eyelids gaudy spots floated: “But what if it talks?” drifted through his drowsy brain. The whirr of the sewing machine ceased: the thread must have broken. His brain, uncoupling neurons, slept.
A sound arose from nothingness and from never, weaving in a long-drawn-out “i-i-i” and from “i” to “ill” and down to “will,” and from “will” to “kill” to “killed” and back to “i.”
His brain, needled by the sound, re-coupled neurons and, tugging at nerve cords, opened his eyelids: the room, and all around it, was sleepy and mute; but the sheaths over the parrot’s eyes had rolled up and its beak was moving slightly, curving like a comma in an invisible text.
Gleb Borisovich fumbled feet into shoes, scratched his head, got up, groped around the table, clinked glass, and a minute later an alcohol-soaked bit of bread crept, dripping drops, from glass to mouth: “Boris and Gleb, Glebel the rebel, the rebel the devil, the infidel . . .” Bit followed bit, and soon his eyes were covered with parrot-like sheaths, and through his brain there ranged a dreary and long-drawn-out: “i-i-i . . .”
•
Next morning Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky got up as usual, awakened by the usual noises. In the kitchen Primuses were humming; in the WC the water kept crashing down with a short sob.
Through the wall on his right voices were bickering: “It’s not my turn to wait our turn.” (“Again those good-for-nothings, screechy scolds, curse them”—Gleb Borisovich closed his eyes goodbye). From below, from the yard, came the muffled hoot of an automobile—this was for the tight-lipped wall on his left, behind which lived an up-and-coming Party member.
Borisoglebsky collected on his palm the bread crumbs from last night’s repast and placed them under the parrot’s beak. The bird was sitting next to volume five of Klyuchevsky,* squinting a round eye and uneasily raking the sand with the long toes of its scaly yellow feet.
Padlock bit into shackle, and Comrade Borisoglebsky, briefcase waggling under one elbow, counted off forty-three steps with his soles. The waiting motorcar flung mud and fumes at him as it drove off with the man from behind the left-hand wall. Gleb Borisovich wanted to wipe away the mud with his sleeve, but Comrade Borisoglebsky didn’t care, and so they, that is he, trudged on, or no, they trudged on with the day, trudging from dawn to dusk, by the familiar route.
“Until four thirty every day I sympathize with Soviet rule,” Gleb Borisovich liked to joke in moments of confidentiality. “Why not? But at four thirty-one, heh . . .”—and his confidants would take up his “heh” with an echoing “ha-ha” or a prescient “hmm.” It was five fifteen when Gleb Borisovich, having done his forty-three-step scale in reverse, walked into the apartment. Even before opening the outer door he had heard a high, strained, one-note sound. Puzzled, he stepped into
the dark front hall—the sound, unbroken, with a guttural glide, continued. From the front hall he started down the passage that led to his door, and suddenly froze: the door to his room was wide open, and seven or eight backs jammed together were blocking the way. “Search—arrest—curtains,”—skittered like a mouse through his brain. “Should I run or . . .” Most likely, no one would have noticed his escape since all faces and attention were turned toward the forced-open room* and the guttural sound filtering out over the threshold, but it was precisely that evenly reverberating thread, gradually breaking up in his unfogging mind into words and syllables, that had intercepted, between nerve and muscle, the flight reflex. The parrot’s voice—Borisoglebsky could clearly distinguish only the bird’s whistles and clicks in a sound spinning itself out like a web, monotonously articulating . . .
1928
1. Stop. (German)
2. Fire! (German)
UNWITTING STREET
(A packet of letters from one person to various addressees)
1
SIX LONG RINGS
TVERSKAYA 4 AND, I THINK, 3
4TH FLOOR, ON THE LEFT
I made your acquaintance as I was zigzagging up your narrow and rather dark stairwell. On an apartment signboard—on a white ground framed in red—your surname stood at the bottom. But I’ve forgotten it, forgive me. I remember only that you’re six-rings.* That in itself is descriptive. An apartment’s most respectable tenant always takes the first, shortest possible ring. He’s usually some sort of boss, a man with a briefcase. He doesn’t have time to listen and count off rings. After the first metallic jolt to his hearing, he stops counting and goes back to his figures and reports. The man of two rings is already not a being with a briefcase, but a being under a briefcase. He’s fairly respectable, lives on extra rations, but works both in his dreaming and waking hours, round the clock.* As for the six-ring tenant, he doesn’t matter. A forbearing person, he is borne because of his forbearance. And that’s all. And I know that you, forbearingly counting off your six, are so submissive that you will leaf through the pages of this unsolicited letter to the end. That, in essence, is the only thing I need from you. To be heard out.
Unwitting Street Page 13
