At this point the obvious truth should be mentioned: The inhabitants of the city of excavations were also not from here. They too crawled out from the crater, filthy, smoke-blackened, in rags. There was no return to the place they had come from. They were born in the immediate or distant vicinity of the mass of tapering Ws and As, in regions through which there passes a dark and turbid stream bearing the image of those same letters, recognizable yet indistinct, like steep roofs or pencil-thin steeples. In the city of excavations different Ws and As gazed at their reflection in the river; they were somewhat similar to the others, but more like steeples with their tops snapped off, burned-out roofs, lone apartment buildings surrounded by piles of rubble.
But since nothing in the world can be completely and finally destroyed it is clear that the letters written on the water still exist somewhere and will continue to do so forever along with the city abounding in fragile teacups and flammable furniture, the city of the grotesque, safe, entirely free of disasters and unsusceptible to pathos. Whoever recalls its misfortunes has to laugh: Its sorrow has a false bottom in which merriment is concealed. A lot of space there is occupied by New York, with paper shares swirling in the air like petals, populated by financiers jumping out of the windows of skyscrapers, and New Orleans where black men in white tuxedos play golden saxophones at all hours of the day and night, and London where there are crowds of bankers in bowler hats, urbane criminals, detectives in checkered cycling caps and police inspectors from Scotland Yard moving their lips silently to the rhythm of rag-time music played on out-of-tune upright pianos thrust into the corner under the screen. For in this city there is a movie theater on every street and a piano in every theater. That is why it is swarming with portly industrialists with a monocle in one eye hunting for a wife and trying to marry off their daughters. Bands play tangos for them; tuxedoed waiters bustle around them and the doormen bow low. Here there is everything needed in life: horse races, air shows, military parades and roulette. While in the background fashionable men with small mustaches take the air, a schoolgirl in eyeglasses wanders by and a child newspaper vendor with a cigarette in his mouth hawks his wares.
Within the frame there is no room for what the industrialists never need: rundown stores with no sign or window display, selling matches, shoelaces and cheap soap: things none of those fat genial fellows would ever dream of buying. The anemic storekeepers are doomed to inevitable bankruptcy; there is no hope for the tailors with their many children, masters of the art of turning well-worn garments, nor for the cobblers who can take a pair of boots worn to shreds and turn them into one brand-new shoe. Spurned by the elegant public, they are starving. Their brilliant work is known only to those who cannot afford it. The capricious eye seeks out gleaming signboards and large glass windowpanes behind which are flaunted all possible models, patterns and styles that can be thought up in this city of endless entertainment. Here no frill bears the weight of final things and final things are not anticipated at all. Even those who jump off the bridge into the river do so for banal and laughable reasons.
Can it be said then of this feather-light city that of its buildings not one stone was left upon a stone? Rather they crumbled to the four winds. The latest models, patterns and styles which the world had doted on simply evaporated. They were destroyed at least to the extent that even in recollection they proved strikingly unfashionable. Yet they were destroyed — like everything in the world — only partially. For what is fashion? That which makes a hat with a broad brim and adorned with artificial fruit one day start to look ridiculous, so it becomes clear that it must be replaced with a tiny toque. For a moment everyone believes sincerely that toques will always remain what they are: appropriate in every regard.
The stage of the memory is equipped with panoramas rolled up beneath the ceiling, on which there is a permanent record of the transitory configurations of shop signs, monuments and municipal gardens. In the memory’s submerged theater the empty rows of seats are overgrown with algae. In the standing water everything has its place. The city of toques in window displays becomes completely covered over when all of a sudden from the ceiling there falls the canvas of the next panorama, unrolling as it falls and painted with piles of bricks. The toques arouse pity and it becomes obvious that they must be replaced with headscarves tied beneath the chin.
Behind, yet another panorama is hidden, the one for which large hats with artificial fruit are appropriate: the city of shop signs in two languages, a city glistening with muddy puddles and smelling of must, animals and blood. Against its background there rises a perpetual fog, while a procession moves forward bearing crosses and banners; Cossack horsemen in fur hats raise their swords, the hand of a thief removes a wallet from someone’s pocket and there can be heard the whistle of bullets frozen in midair and the whinnying of horses rearing on their hind legs. After the rain little boys, the illegitimate sons of cooks and firemen, sail paper boats on the frothing streams in the gutters. In this city two train stations stand on either side of the river, each sending forth its own separate railroad network. Between these two rail networks a connecting line is unthinkable. The only possible connection turns out to be a horse-drawn tram that shuttles between the two stations across the entire city, crossing the bridge that spans the river.
This city is built of a twofold kind of imagination to which the two rail networks correspond. One extends toward Moscow and St. Petersburg, the other toward Paris and Lausanne. They are unable to pass beyond the city gates, which does not prevent them from entwining the whole world with their networks — spreading farther every year — and acquiring locomotive sheds, warehouses and provincial garrisons in which it is possible to embezzle the regimental funds and then shoot oneself in the head.
In this city there live sand-diggers who seek consolation at the pub on the corner, and clerks in threadbare frock coats who quail beneath the gaze of their superiors and who have no future in their offices since all the best positions are permanently occupied by jovial old men or cynical young swells; bearded Jews, blacksmiths and carpenters from failing shops, self-aggrandizing engineers, and coughing poets devoid of inspiration. They are passed on the street by carriages containing disdainful generals in white uniforms embroidered with gold thread, and by the steeds of cheerful lieutenants separated by hundreds of versts from their mothers and sisters, uncertain whether the mud beneath their horses’ hooves can be real in a place that is so accidental and in which the only self-evident thing is the garrison.
The area enclosed by the gates is rather cramped. To cross from one end to the other takes half an hour, forty-five minutes in bad weather; the trip leaves no illusions. Certain inhabitants of the city, sick of its narrow horizons, attempted to perish in flames or in snows. Others, equally distressed, decided that it was their duty to live there and that death was a kind of layoff. Both the former and the latter, from the cradle to the grave, when they reached for something with their hand would encounter empty space and when they took a step would bump into a wall. The first perished the way they wanted — in snows or in flames. The second died in unaired rooms, their bedside tables littered with tiny bottles containing bitter medicines, leeches behind their ears. But death could not soothe their pain.