«Let the goat be also,» Pyotr Yevseyevich would ponder. «One could reckon it a junior calf.»
The door to the dwelling opened, and a known peasant, Leonid from the village Koz'ma, appeared.
«How do you do, Pyotr Yevseyevich,» Leonid said. «You should have waited yesterday with us, but instead you hurried away to your flat…»
Pyotr Yevseyevich became flustered and afraid.
«But whatever has happened? Eh? Is not all well in the village there? I saw a beggar drop a burning cigarette — did he burn the estate?»
«Well, the village is well and good out of that cigarette… But right after you left, there were two carts coming from the other end, and an old man in a carriage behind them. The old man says, 'Citizens, do you perhaps need deep water?' We say, 'We do, but we ain't got power to reach at it.' Then the old man says, 'All right, I am a professor from the State and I will get you the water from the mother layer.' The old man spent the night and went away, and two technicians remained with instrument and started to feel inside the soil. Now, Pyotr Yevseyevich, reckon us as we were with drinks. For this I brought you a jug of milk: were it not for you, we would have dug in vain, or sat there without drinking, but then you would walk around and say: wait for the motion of the State, it foresees everything. That has happened. So drink, Pyotr Yevseyevich, our milk for this…»
Pyotr Yevseyevich sat in disappointment: he again went right past the live State and missed its pure original action.
«Here,» he told Leonid. «Here it came and went. From a dry place it will procure water for you, that is what it is worth!»
«Who is it then?» Leonid asked quietly.
«Who!» Pyotr Yevseyevich said abstractly. «I myself do not know who it is, I only adore it in my cogitation, since you and I are merely population. Now I see everything, Leonid, and I shall hold tight to my hope. Let the birds peck at the millet, let the watchmen in the co-operative stare at the radio while mice eat the goods — the State will suddenly catch up with that too, and we should live and have patience.»
«That is right, Pyotr Yevseyevich: by just not touching anything, one shall see the good come.»
«Exactly, Leonid!» Pyotr Yevseyevich agreed. «Without the State you would not drink cow's milk.»
«But where would it go then?» worried Leonid.
«Who knows where! Maybe grass would not grow either.»
«But what would there be?»
«The soil, Leonid, the soil is the main thing! And the soil is a territory of the State, so there would not be any territory! Where would your grass ripen then? It does not grow in an unknown place, it needs territory and earth management. The African Sahara, for one, has no State, and the Arctic Ocean neither, and that is why nothing grows there: only the sand, the heat and the dead ice!»
«Shame on such places!» Leonid forcefully affirmed and immediately fell silent. Then he added in an ordinary human voice: «Come visit us, Pyotr Yevseyevich, we miss somebody's presence without you.»
«Were you strict citizens, you would not have missed anything,» Pyotr Yevseyevich said.
Leonid remembered that there was no water yet in Koz'ma, and drank from Pyotr Yevseyevich's water pail to stock up for the stomach.
After the peasant's departure, Pyotr Yevseyevich tasted the presented milk and went to wander amid the town. He would touch the bricks of the houses on his way, stroke the hedges, and thankfully observe what was unreachable to sensation. Perhaps the people who created these bricks and hedges were already dead from old age and emaciation of labour, but from their bodies there remained bricks and boards — objects that comprised the sum and substance of the State. Pyotr Yevseyevich had long discovered for his joy that the State was the useful act of the dead, as well as of the living but labouring population; without production of the State the population would die meaninglessly.
At the end of his journey Pyotr Yevseyevich accidentally arrived to the railway station; hearing the worried honks of the steam locomotives, he did not completely trust the railroad. Immediately an indignation rose in Pyotr Yevseyevich: in the third class waiting hall a boy was burning government-supplied logs in a stove, although it was summer.
«You slime, why do you burn fuel?» asked Pyotr Yevseyevich.
The boy did not take offense, as he was used to his life.
«I was told so,» he said. «They let me spend nights at the station for this.»
Here Pyotr Yevseyevich could not think of a reason why one would need to heat up the stoves in summer. But the boy himself helped Pyotr Yevseyevich to disperse the puzzlement: there were heaps of rotten logs at the station, and to avoid carrying them out it had been decided to burn them in the stoves of the rooms and let the heat come out of the doors.
«Give me, Mister, a couple of kopecks!» asked the boy after his story.
He was asking ashamedly, but without respect for Pyotr Yevseyevich. However, for Pyotr Yevseyevich the question was not the two kopecks but the place of this boy in the State: was he necessary? Such thoughts have already started to torment Pyotr Yevseyevich. The boy reluctantly told him that his mother and girl sisters lived in the village and had only potatoes to eat. Mother had told him, 'Go away, perhaps you shall find life somewhere. Or else, you'd have to suffer with us, but I love you.' She gave him a piece of bread she borrowed in the village, or maybe she lied and had gone out peddling. The boy took bread, went out to the railways and climbed into an empty car. Since then he was going places: he had been to Leningrad, Tver', Moscow and Torzhok, and now he was here. Nobody would give him a job, saying: he has little strength and there are many orphans already.
«So what are you up to?» Pyotr Yevseyevich would ask him. «You have to live and wait until the State looks back at you.»
«Can't wait,» the boy answered. «The winter will come soon, I am afraid to die then. Even in summer people die. I have seen one in Likhoslavl': he went to sleep in a garbage box and died in there.»
«But don't you want to return to your mother?»
«No. There is nothing to eat and many sisters, their faces are pock-marked and the men do not marry them.»
«Why didn't they get vaccinated in time? The state doctors vaccinate everybody at no expense.»
«I don't know,» the boy said coolly.
«You do not know,» Pyotr Yevseyevich exclaimed with annoyance, «but now one has to take care of you! Your family is at fault for all this: the State vaccinates against smallpox for free. If your sisters were vaccinated when they needed it, they would be long married now, and you would have a place at home! But if you don't want to live according to the State — so now you have to wander by railroads. It is all your fault — go to your mother and tell her! So why should I give you the two kopecks after this? Never! One must get vaccinated in time, citizen, or else one would have to free-ride the trains and wander on the rails!»
The boy was silent. Pyotr Yevseyevich left him there alone, not feeling any more pity for the guilty.
At home he found a notice: he had to report tomorrow for the next re-registration at the labour exchange, where Pyotr Yevseyevich was registered as an unemployed from the Union of Soviet Salespeople. He liked to visit the labour exchange, feeling that he was serving the State in that institution.