They walked to the door. Junta let Fyodor Simeonovich out first and, before going out himself, he glanced sideways at me and carefully traced out a Star of Solomon on the wall with his finger. The star flared up and then began slowly fading away, like the trace of an electron beam on the screen of an oscilloscope. I spat three times over my left shoulder.
Cristóbal Joséevich Junta, the head of the Department of the Meaning of Life, was a remarkable man, but apparently quite heartless. In his early youth he had spent a long time as a grand inquisitor, but then he’d fallen into heresy, although to the present day he’d retained the habits of those times, and rumor had it that he’d found them very useful during the struggle against the fifth column in Spain. He performed almost all of his abstruse experiments either on himself or on his colleagues, as I had been indignantly informed at the general meeting of the trade union. He was studying the meaning of life, but he hadn’t made a great deal of progress so far, although he had produced some interesting results. For instance, he had proved, at least theoretically, that death was by no means a necessary attribute of life. People had expressed their indignation at this discovery, too—at the philosophy seminar.
He allowed almost no one to enter his office, and vague rumors circulated in the Institute about it being full of all sorts of interesting things. They said that standing in one corner was the magnificently stuffed body of an old acquaintance of Cristóbal Joséevich, an SS Standartenführer in full dress uniform, with a monocle, dagger, Iron Cross, Oak Leaves, and other paraphernalia. Junta was a magnificent taxidermist and, according to Cristóbal Joséevich himself, so was the Standartenführer. But it was Cristóbal Joséevich who had gotten his hand in first. He always liked to get his hand in first, in everything he did. But he was not entirely without skepticism either. A huge poster hanging in one of his laboratories posed the question DO WE REALLY NEED OURSELVES FOR ANYTHING? A quite exceptional individual.
At exactly 3:00, in accordance with the labor regulations, doctor of science Ambrosius Ambroisovich Vybegallo brought me his keys. He was wearing felt boots soled with leather and a smelly sheepskin coat like a cab driver’s with his gray, dirty beard sticking out through its upturned collar. He wore his hair in a bowl cut, so no one had ever seen his ears.
“It, er…” he said as he came up to me. “It could just happen that one of mine will hatch out today. In my laboratory, that is. It, er… it would be a good idea to keep an eye out. I’ve left him plenty of supplies. It’s er… five loaves of bread, you know, some steamed bran, two buckets of skim milk. But when, er… he’s eaten all that lot, he’ll start kicking up a fuss, you know. So, mon cher, if anything happens, you… er… just give me a jingle, my good man.” He set a bunch of barn door keys down in front of me and opened his mouth in some perplexity, with his eyes fixed on me.
His eyes were transparent and he had grains of millet stuck in his beard.
“Where shall I jingle you?” I asked.
I disliked him very much. He was a cynic and he was a fool. The work that he carried out for his 350 rubles a month could quite easily have been called eugenics, but no one did call it that—they were afraid of provoking him. This Vybegallo had declared that all the misfortunes of the world were… er… the result of material, you know, deprivation, and that if you gave a man everything—bread, that is, and steamed bran—then he wouldn’t be a man, but an angel. He promoted this feeble idea in every possible way, brandishing volumes of classic texts and ripping quotations out of their living flesh with quite indescribable simplemindedness, mercilessly suppressing and expurgating everything that didn’t suit him.
Even the Academic Council had shuddered under the onslaught of this positively primordial, unrestrained demagogy, and Vybegallo’s theme had been included in the research plan. Acting strictly according to this plan, painstakingly measuring his achievements in terms of percentage plan fulfillment and never forgetting about operational economy, improving the efficiency of use of operating capital, and the issue of practical relevance to society, Vybegallo had developed three experimental models: the model of Man entirely unsatisfied, the model of Man gastrically unsatisfied, and the model of Man totally satisfied. The entirely unsatisfied anthropoid model had been ready first—it had hatched two weeks earlier. A pitiful being, covered with sores like Job, half decomposed, tormented by every disease in existence known and unknown, incredibly hungry, suffering from cold and heat at the same time, it had staggered out into the corridor, deafened the Institute with a series of loud, inarticulate complaints, and died. Vybegallo was triumphant. Now he could consider he had proved that if you didn’t give a man any food or drink or treat his ailments then he, you know… er… would be unhappy and he might even die. Like this model had died. The Academic Council was horrified. Vybegallo’s project had assumed an aspect of the macabre. But Vybegallo, not flustered in the slightest, had submitted two statements that demonstrated, first, that three lab assistants from his laboratory went out every year to work on the state farm sponsored by the Institute and, second, that he, Vybegallo, had been a prisoner under the old czarist regime, and now he regularly gave popular lectures in the municipal lecture hall and outlying districts. And while the dumbfounded commission struggled to grasp the logic of what was going on, he calmly shipped in four truckloads of herring heads from the Institute-sponsored fish processing plant (under the terms of a scheme for developing ties with industry) for the gastrically unsatisfied anthropoid, who was approaching a state of readiness. The commission wrote a report and the Institute waited fearfully for what would happen next. The other people on Vybegallo’s floor took unpaid leave.
“Where shall I jingle you?” I asked.
“Jingle me? At home, where else on New Year’s Eve? Moral fiber has to be maintained, my good man. The New Year should be seen in at home. That’s the way we see things, n’est-ce pas?” (Vybegallo loved to sprinkle his speech with isolated phrases in what he referred to as “the French dialect.”)
“At home, I know that, but what’s the number?”
“Ah, that… er… you look in the book. Can read, can’t you? You just look in the book, then. We’ve got no secrets, not like others I could mention. En masse.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll jingle you.”
“Do jingle, mon cher, do jingle. And if he starts to bite… er… then you just smack him in the chops, and don’t hold back. C’est la vie.”
I plucked up my courage and blurted out, “If I’m ton cher, perhaps we ought to drink to Bruderschaft?”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind, it’s nothing,” I said.
He looked at me for a while with those transparent eyes that expressed absolutely nothing at all, then said, “If it’s nothing, that’s all right, then. Happy New Year to you when it comes. Keep well. It… er… au revoir, then.”
He pulled on his cap with earflaps and left. I hastily opened the small top window.
Roman Oira-Oira breezed in wearing a green coat with a lambskin collar. He twitched his hooked nose and inquired, “Did Vybegallo just drop by?”
“He did,” I said.
“Yes indeed,” he said, “it’s the herrings. Take my keys. Do you know where he dumped one truckload? Under Gian Giacomo’s windows. Right under his office. A little New Year’s present. Might as well have a cigarette now that I’m here.”