I took a plate full of fried fish, three glasses of tea, and three sturgeon sandwiches, paid with a heap of the old woman’s copper coins (“Been standing begging at the church door…” the woman at the counter growled), made myself comfortable in a secluded corner, and tucked in, observing with pleasure these manly men with voices hoarse from smoking cigarettes. It was a pleasure to see how tanned, independent, and robust they were, how well they knew life, how they enjoyed eating their food, smoking, and talking. They were squeezing every last drop out of their break before the long hours jolting down a dull road in the stuffy heat of the cabin, the dust, and the sun. If I weren’t a programmer, I would have been a driver, and I wouldn’t have been working in some pitiful little automobile, or even on a bus, but on some great monster of a truck so big you’d need a ladder to climb up into the cabin and a small crane to change a wheel.
The two young men sitting at the next table didn’t look like truckers, so I paid no attention to them at first. And they paid no attention to me either. But just as I was finishing my second glass of tea, I heard the word “sofa.” And then one of them said, “In that case, it’s not clear why that Lohuchil exists at all…” and I started listening. Unfortunately they were talking softly and I was sitting with my back to them, so I couldn’t hear very much. But the voices sounded familiar: “No theses… just the sofa…”; “That hairy one?”; “The sofa… sixteenth degree…”; “For transgression no higher than the fourteenth degree…”; “Easier to model the translator…”; “Well, who doesn’t giggle at him!”; “I’ll give him a razor…”; “We can’t do it without the sofa…” Then one of them tried to clear his throat in such a familiar manner that I immediately remembered the night before and turned around, but they were already walking toward the door—two big young guys with massive shoulders and bodybuilders’ necks. I saw them through the window for a while, too: they walked across the square, around the little garden, and disappeared behind the diagrams. I finished off my tea and my sandwich and went out. So they’re concerned about the sofa, I thought. They’re not bothered about the mermaid. They’re not interested in the talking cat. But it seems they can’t manage without the sofa… I tried to remember what the sofa in my room was like, but I couldn’t recall anything unusual. Just an ordinary sofa. A good sofa. Comfortable. Only the reality you dreamed about on it was rather strange.
It would be a good idea now to go back there and get a firm grip on all this sofa business. Try experimenting a bit with the whimsical book, have a frank word with Vasily the cat, and see whether there was anything else interesting to be found in the Log Hut on Chicken Legs. But my Moskvich was waiting for me back there, and I needed to carry out a DM and a TS. I could just about live with the idea of a DM—that was only daily maintenance, shaking out the floor mats and washing the car down with a pressurized hose, which if necessary could be replaced by a garden watering can or a bucket. But that TS… On a hot day any man who likes to keep himself neat and tidy shudders at the very thought of a TS, because a TS is a technical service, and a technical service involves me lying under the car with a grease gun in my hands, gradually transferring the contents of the gun to the grease nipples and my own facial features. It’s hot and stuffy under the car, and its bottom is crusted with a thick layer of dried-on mud… In other words, I didn’t really feel like going back.
4
Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!
I bought the day before yesterday’s Pravda, drank a glass of sparkling water, and settled down on a bench in the little garden, in the shade of the Board of Honor. It was eleven o’clock. I looked through the newspaper carefully. It took me seven minutes. Then I read an article about hydroponics, an exposé about bribe-takers in Kansk, and a long letter to the editor from the workers at a chemical plant. Maybe I should go to the movies, I thought. But I’d already seen Kozara—once in the theater and once on television. Then I decided to have another glass of water, folded up the newspaper, and stood up. I only had a five-kopeck piece left out of all the old woman’s coppers. I’ll drink it all away, I decided, downed a glass of sparkling water with syrup, received one kopeck change, and bought a box of matches with it at the next kiosk. Now there was absolutely nothing at all left for me to do in the center of town, so I just followed my nose—into the narrow street between shop number 2 and cafeteria number 11.
There was almost no one on the street. A big, dusty truck with a clattering trailer overtook me. The driver had his elbow and head stuck out of the window of his cab, drearily observing the cobbled road surface. The street ran downhill around a sharp turn to the right, and beside the pavement at the bend there was the cast-iron barrel of an old cannon sticking up out of the ground, its mouth choked with earth and cigarette butts. Soon after that the street ended at the sheer bank of the river. I sat on the steep edge, admiring the view, then crossed to the other side of the street and started making my way back.
I wonder where that truck went, I thought. There was no way down that steep bank. I started looking around for gateways along the street, and I came across a small but very strange building, squeezed in between two gloomy brick “emporiums.” The windows on the ground floor of the building were protected by iron bars and painted over halfway up with whitewash. There were no doors into the house at all. I noticed that straightaway because here the sign that is usually set beside the gates or over the entrance was hanging between two windows. It read NITWiT AS USSR. I backed away to the middle of the street: yes, two stories, each with ten windows, and not a single door. And adjoining emporiums on the left and the right. NITWiT of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, I thought. National Institute of TWiT, I suppose. And Lohuchil, the Log Hut on Chicken Legs, I thought, is this NITWiT’s museum. My traveling companions must be from here too. And those others in the tearoom… A flock of crows rose into the air from the roof of a building and circled, cawing, above the street. I turned and walked back toward the square.
We are all naive materialists, I thought. And we are all rationalists. We demand an immediate rational explanation for everything; we want everything reduced to a handful of known facts. And not one of us has even an ounce of dialectics. It never occurs to anybody that the known facts and some new phenomenon might be separated by an entire ocean of the unknown, so we declare the new phenomenon supernatural and, therefore, impossible. What kind of response, for instance, would Montesquieu have given to the statement that a dead man had revived forty-five minutes after his heart was known to have stopped? No doubt a hostile one. He would have declared it obscurantism and superstitious nonsense. That is, if he didn’t simply dismiss such a claim out of hand. But if it had happened in front of his very eyes, then he would have found himself in an extremely difficult situation. As I did now, only I was more used to it. He would have been obliged to regard the resurrection as a fraud, or to deny the evidence of his own senses, or even to abandon materialism. Most likely he would have chosen to regard the resurrection as a fraud. But for the rest of his life the memory of that cunning trick would have irritated his mind, like a mote in his eye…