“Understanding!” said the Mentor, slightly raising his voice.
“What—understanding? Understanding of what?”
“Understanding,” the Mentor repeated. “That’s what you’ve never had before—understanding!”
“I’ve got this understanding of yours right up to here now!” said Andrei, tapping the edge of his open hand against his Adam’s apple. “I understand everything in the world now. It took thirty years to reach this understanding, and now I’ve got there at last. Nobody needs me, and nobody needs anyone. Whether I exist or I don’t, whether I fight the fight or kick back and lounge on the sofa—it makes no difference. Nothing can be changed, nothing can be put right. All I can do is find myself a more or less comfortable niche. Everything moves along on its own; I don’t make any difference. There it is, that’s your understanding—and there’s nothing else left for me to understand. But you tell me what I’m supposed to do with this understanding! Pickle it for winter or eat it right now?”
The Mentor nodded. “Precisely,” he said. “That is the final borderline: What do you do with your understanding? How do you live with it? You have to live anyway, don’t you?”
“The right time to live is when you don’t have any understanding!” Andrei said with quiet fury. “With this understanding the right thing to do is die! And if I weren’t such a coward, if the damned protoplasm didn’t scream so loud inside me, I’d know what to do. I’d choose a good, strong rope…”
He stopped speaking.
The Mentor took the flask, carefully filled one shot glass, then the other, and pensively screwed the cap back on. “Well, let’s start from the fact that you’re not a coward,” he said. “And the reason you haven’t used that rope has nothing to do with you being afraid… Somewhere in your subconscious, and not so very deep, I assure you, lies the conviction that it is possible to live, even with understanding. And live pretty well. Interesting, that.” He started pushing one of the shot glasses over to Andrei with his fingernail. “Remember how your father tried to force you to read The War of the Worlds, and you didn’t want to? How furious you were—you stuck that cursed book under the sofa so you could get back to your illustrated Baron Munchausen… Wells bored you, he made you feel sick, you didn’t understand why the hell you had to read him, you didn’t want to know about him… But later you read that book twelve times, until you knew it by heart, you drew illustrations for it, and you even tried to write a sequel.”
“So what?” Andrei said morosely.
“And that kind of thing happened to you time and again!” said the Mentor. “And it will happen again, more than once. You’ve just had understanding hammered into you, and it makes you feel sick, you don’t understand what the hell you need it for, you don’t want to know about it…” He picked up his shot glass. “Here’s to the sequel!” he said.
Andrei stepped up to the table, and he took his shot glass, and he raised it to his lips, feeling the usual sense of relief as all his dismal doubts were dispersed yet again, and a new glimmer of light appeared somewhere up ahead in the darkness that had seemed impenetrable, and now he was supposed to drink up, and briskly slam the empty glass down onto the table, and say something bright and cheerful, and spring into action, but just at that moment some third character, who previously had always remained silent—he must have been sleeping, or lying around drunk, or he simply couldn’t give a damn—suddenly snickered and babbled, “Doo de doo de doo de doo!”
Andrei splashed the cognac onto the floor, put the shot glass down on the tray, stuck his hands in his pockets, and said, “But there’s something I still don’t understand, Mentor… Drink, drink, enjoy it, I’m not in the mood.” He couldn’t look at that ruddy face anymore. He turned away and went over to the window again. “You’re too much of a yes-man, Mr. Mentor. You’re Voronin number two, my yellow, rubbery conscience, a used condom… Everything’s fine with you, Voronin, everything’s just great, my dear friend. The important thing is that we’re safe and sound, and all the others can go croak. If there isn’t enough food, I’ll just shoot Katzman, eh? All fine and dandy!”
The door creaked behind him. He looked around. The room was empty. And the shot glasses were empty, and the flask was empty, and his chest felt empty, as if something large that was always there had been cut out of it. Maybe a tumor. Maybe his heart…
Already growing accustomed to this new sensation, Andrei walked over to the colonel’s bed, took the belt down off the nail, girded it on real good and tight, and shifted the holster around onto his stomach.
“A keepsake,” he told the snow-white pillow in a loud voice.
PART VI
Conclusion
The sun was at its zenith. Its disk, copper colored through the dust, hung at the center of a dirty white sky, and his misshapen shadow writhed and bristled right under the soles of his shoes, sometimes gray and blurred, sometimes suddenly seeming to come alive, acquiring sharply defined outlines and flooding with blackness—and then it was especially ugly. There wasn’t even a hint of any road here—there was bumpy, yellow-gray clay, cracked and dead, as hard as stone, so naked it was quite impossible to understand how there could be so much dust everywhere.
The wind, thank God, was blowing at his back. Somewhere far behind him it had sucked up countless tons of this abominable, incandescent powder and was dragging it with obtuse stubbornness along this sunbaked ledge squeezed in between the Abyss and the Yellow Wall, sometimes flinging it in swirling protuberances right up to the sky, sometimes spinning it into lithe, flirtatious, swan-necked dust devils, or sometimes simply tumbling it along in a billowing wave, and then, suddenly enraged, it would fling this fine, prickly flour against his back and into his hair, hurling it furiously at the sweat-soaked nape of his neck, lashing his hands and ears with it, filling his pockets with it, pouring it in behind his collar…
There was nothing here; there hadn’t been anything here for a long time. Maybe never. Sun, clay, wind. Only occasionally, swirling and skipping like some antic jester, the prickly skeleton of a bush would go hurtling by, torn out by the roots at some spot lying God only knew how far behind him. Not a drop of water, not a single sign of life. Nothing but dust, dust, dust, dust…
Every now and again the clay under his feet disappeared and a covering of crumbled stone began. Everything here was as scorching hot as in hell. Sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, gigantic, craggy fragments of cliffs peered out of the clouds of swirling dust—looking as gray as if they had been sprinkled with flour. The wind and heat had given them incredibly strange and astonishing forms, and the way they appeared and then disappeared again, like ghosts, was frightening, as if they were playing a crags’ game of hide-and-go-seek. And the crumbled stone he walked over kept getting coarser and coarser, until suddenly the deposit ended and the clay rang under his feet again.
The stones behaved very badly. They squirmed out from under his feet or did their damnedest to pierce as deeply as possible into the soles of his shoes, to pierce through them into his living body. The clay behaved a bit more decently. But it still tried every trick it knew. It suddenly bulged up into bald mounds, or out of the blue produced idiotic inclines; it parted to form deep, steep-sided ravines, on the bottom of which the stagnant heat of millennia made it impossible to breathe… It played its own game too, its own clay version of “statues,” inventing tricky metamorphoses within the limits of its own clayey imagination. Everything here played its own game. But everything played on the same side…