“Hey, Andrei!” Izya called hoarsely. “Andriukhaaa!”
“What do you want?” Andrei asked over his shoulder, and stopped. Wobbling about on its loose little wheels, the cart ran on by inertia and hit him on the back of his knees.
“Look!” Izya was standing about ten paces behind Andrei, holding out his hand to show him something.
“What is it?” asked Andrei, not particularly interested.
Izya laid into his harness and trundled his cart toward Andrei, without lowering his hand. Andrei watched him as he approached—a terrible sight, with his beard hanging down over his chest and his hair, gray with dust, standing up on end, in an unbelievably ragged jacket, with his wet, hairy body showing through the holes. The fringe of his trousers barely covered his knees, and his right shoe was gaping wide open, as if it were begging to be fed, exposing a set of dirty toes with broken, black nails… A luminary of the spirit. A priest and apostle of the eternal temple of culture…
“A comb!” Izya proclaimed triumphantly when he got close.
It was the very cheapest kind of comb—plastic, with broken teeth—not even a comb, really, more a fragment of a comb, and at the point where it was broken off, it was still possible to make out some kind of Soviet Industrial Standard number, but the plastic had been bleached by many decades of the sun’s heat and ferociously corroded by a scab of dust.
“There now,” said Andrei, “and you keep harping on: no one before us, no one before us.”
“That’s not what I harp on about at all,” Izya said amicably. “Why don’t we sit down for a while, eh?”
“OK then, let’s sit,” Andrei agreed without any enthusiasm, and Izya instantly plumped his backside down on the ground, without even taking off his harness, and started stuffing the fragment of comb into his breast pocket.
Andrei set his cart crosswind, took off his harness, and sat down, leaning his back and his head against the hot canisters. Immediately there was noticeably less wind, but now the naked clay burned his buttocks cruelly through the old, worn fabric.
“Where’s this reservoir of yours?” he said derisively. “Windbag.”
“Keep on looking!” Izya replied. “It’s got to be there!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s this joke, about a merchant,” Izya gladly explained. “A certain merchant went to a bawdy house—”
“Here we go again!” said Andrei. “Still yammering on about that? There’s no way to cool you off, Katzman, I swear to God…”
“I can’t afford to cool off,” Izya explained. “I’ve got to be ready at the very first opportunity.”
“The two of us are going to croak here,” said Andrei.
“God forbid! Don’t even think about it, don’t even imagine it.”
“I don’t think about it,” said Andrei.
It was true. The thought of death—which was inevitable, of course—entered his head only very rarely now. Either the cutting edge of this sense of doom had already been completely blunted, or his flesh was so desiccated and exhausted that it had given up yelling and howling, and now only croaked faintly somewhere on the threshold of audibility… Or perhaps quantity had finally been transformed into quality, and he had begun to be affected by the presence of Izya, with his almost unnatural indifference to death, which constantly circled around them, sometimes moving in right up close, then suddenly moving away again, but never letting them out of its sight… Whatever way it was, for many days now, if Andrei did start talking about the inevitable end, it was only to convince himself again and again of his growing indifference to it.
“What did you say?” Andrei asked.
“I said: the important thing is, don’t you be afraid of croaking here.”
“Ah, you’ve told me that a hundred times already. I haven’t been afraid for ages, and you just keep yammering on.”
“Well, that’s good,” Izya said peaceably. He stretched out his legs. “What could I tie this sole up with?” he inquired profoundly. “It’s about to fall off in the very next increment of time.”
“Cut off the end of the harness there and tie it up with that… Shall I give you a knife?”
Izya contemplated his protruding toes for a while. “Never mind,” he said eventually. “Later, when it completely comes off… Maybe we could take a little nip?”
“Hands and feet too cold to jig,” Andrei said, and immediately remembered Uncle Yura. It was hard to remember Uncle Yura now. He was from another life.
“Maybe we should take a swig?” Izya joined in exuberantly, glancing searchingly into Andrei’s eyes.
“Screw you!” Andrei said with relish. “Know what water you can swig? That water you read about somewhere. You lied to me about the reservoir, right?”
Just as he expected, Izya immediately blew his top. “Go to hell! Who do you think I am—your nanny?”
“Well, your manuscript lied, then.”
“Fool,” Izya said contemptuously. “Manuscripts don’t lie. They’re not books. You just have to know how to read them.”
“Well, you don’t know how to read them, then.”
Izya merely glanced at him and instantly started fidgeting about, getting up. “There’ll be all sorts of shit here…” he muttered. “Come on, get up! You want a reservoir? Then stop sitting around here… get up, I tell you!”
The wind exulted, lashing Andrei’s ears with prickles, and joyfully started swirling dust around in circles above the bald clay, like a playful dog, but the clay moved sluggishly toward him, behaving docilely for a while, as if it were gathering its strength, and then started tilting up into an incline.
If I could just finally figure out where the hell I’m rushing so fast, thought Andrei. All my life I’ve been rushing somewhere—like a stupid fool, I just can’t stay still… And the worst thing is, there’s no meaning to it any longer. There always used to be some kind of meaning. Even if it was absolutely paltry, maybe even totally screwy, but even so, whenever I was getting beaten, let’s say on the face, I could always tell myself: it’s OK, it’s in the name of… it’s the struggle…
“Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” Izya had said. (It was in the Crystal Palace; they’d just eaten chicken, pressure-roasted, and they were lying on mattresses of bright synthetic material on the edge of a pool with transparent, backlit water.) “Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” said Izya, picking his teeth with a well-washed finger. “All those plowmen of yours, all those lathe operators, all those blooming mills, cracking plants, branched varieties of wheat, lasers and masers. All that is shit, manure. It all passes away. Either it simply passes away without a trace, forever, or it passes away because it changes. All this only seems important because the majority believes it’s important. And the majority only believes it’s important because its goal is to stuff its belly and gratify its flesh with absolutely as little effort as possible. But if you think about it, who gives a damn about the majority? I personally have nothing against it—to some extent I am the majority. But I’m not interested in the majority. The history of the majority has a beginning and an end. At the beginning the majority eats what it’s given. And at the end it spends its entire life trying to solve the problem of choice. What special, tasty sort of item can I choose to eat? Something I haven’t eaten before?”
“Well, that’s still a pretty long way off,” Andrei said.
“Not as far off as you imagine,” Izya objected. “And even if it is a long way off, that’s not the point. The main thing is, there’s a beginning and there’s an end…”