“The fire brigade! We need to call the fire brigade!” insisted the scornful bass voice that preferred baboons to phosgene. “With ladders, and hoses…”
“Aw, come on, where would we find that many firemen?”
“The firemen are on Main Street.”
“Maybe we should light up some torches? Maybe they’ll be frightened by fire!”
“Dammit! Why the hell did they take away the policemen’s guns? They need to reissue them!”
“Shouldn’t we be getting back home, guys? When I think that my wife’s there all alone right now…”
“Aw, now you come on. We all have wives. These women are someone’s wives too.”
“That’s true, right enough…”
“Maybe we could get up on the roofs? From the roofs we could use something to… you know…”
“What are you going to reach them with, cretin? That stick of yours?”
“Oh, the lousy bastards!” the contemptuous bass suddenly bellowed in loathing. He got a running start, strained hard, and flung his metal pole at the long-suffering food stalclass="underline" it pierced straight through the plywood wall. Black-tail’s gang looked at it in surprise, paused for a moment, and then went back to devouring the cucumbers and potatoes. The women in the windows burst into derisive laughter.
“Well, anyway,” someone said judiciously. “At least by being here, we keep them here, we constrain their actions, so to speak. That’s something, at least. While we’re here, they’ll be afraid of moving farther into the City…”
Everyone gazed around and then suddenly started babbling, and the judicious individual was rapidly forced to pipe down. First, it turned out that the baboons were moving farther into the City, notwithstanding the presence of said judicious individual. And second, even if the baboons had not been moving farther in, was this judicious individual planning to spend the night here? Live here? Sleep here? Crap and piss here?
At that moment they heard the lazy clip-clopping of hooves and the creaking of a cart; everyone looked up the street and fell silent. Approaching along the roadway at a leisurely pace was a two-horse cart. Sitting sideways on it, dozing with his legs dangling in their crude tarpaulin-fabric boots, was a large man in a faded, Russian-style army tunic and cotton breeches faded to match. The man’s bowed head was crowned with a mop of light brown hair. He was holding the reins slackly in his huge brown hands. The horses—one chestnut, the other dapple gray—moved their feet lazily and also seemed to be dozing on the move.
“He’s going to the market,” someone said respectfully. “A farmer.”
“Right, guys, the farmers have it easy with this—when will these bastards ever reach them…?”
“Actually, when I imagine baboons in the crops…”
Feeling curious, Andrei took a closer look. He had never seen a farmer before in all the time he had spent in the City, although he had heard a lot about these people—supposedly they were dour folk and a bit on the wild and weird side. They lived far away in wild places, where they waged a harsh struggle against swamps and jungles, they only drove into the City to sell the produce from their farms, and unlike the City people, they never changed their profession.
As the cart slowly moved closer, the driver’s lowered head trembled and from time to time, without waking up, he smacked his lips and jerked lightly on the reins. Suddenly the baboons, who had been in a relatively peaceable mood so far, flew into a state of extremely vicious agitation. Perhaps the horses annoyed them, or perhaps they had finally grown tired of the presence of outsiders on their street, but they suddenly started kicking up a ruckus and tearing around with their fangs glittering, and several of the most feisty scrambled up the drainpipes onto the roofs and started smashing the tiles up there.
One of the first pieces hit the driver of the cart right between his shoulder blades. The farmer started, straightened up, and looked around at his surroundings with his bloodshot eyes wide open. The first person he noticed was the intellectual type in glasses, who was returning from his futile pursuit, a solitary figure looming up behind the cart. Without saying a word, the farmer dropped the reins (the horses immediately stopped), jumped down off the cart, and darted toward his assailant, swinging back his arm as he went, but just then another piece of roof tile struck the intellectual type on the top of his head. He gasped, dropped his metal pole, and squatted down on his haunches, clutching his head in his hands. The farmer stopped, bewildered. Pieces of broken tile fell onto the road surface around him, shattering into orange crumbs.
“Brigade, take cover!” Fritz commanded valiantly, and darted toward the nearest entryway. Everyone scattered, dashing in all directions. Andrei huddled against the wall in the dead zone, watching curiously as the farmer gazed around himself in total bewilderment, clearly unable to fathom even a single little thing. His clouded gaze slid over the cornices and the drainpipes draped with raging baboons. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, then opened his eyes wide again and exclaimed in a loud voice, “Hell’s fucking bells!”
“Take cover,” they shouted to him from all sides. “Hey, whiskers! Get over here! You’ll catch one to the dome, you swampland simpleton!”
“What the hell’s going on?” the farmer asked loudly, turning toward the intellectual type, who was crawling around on all fours, trying to find his glasses. “Who are all this lot here, can you tell me?”
“Monkeys, naturally,” the intellectual type responded haughtily. “Surely you can see that for yourself, my man?”
“Well now, the things that go on round here,” the dumbfounded farmer exclaimed, only now waking up completely. “You’re always coming up with something or other…”
This son of the swamps was in a philosophical and well-disposed mood now. Having satisfied himself that the offense he had suffered could not really be regarded as such, he was simply rather flabbergasted by the sight of the shaggy hordes frisking along the cornices and clambering up the streetlamps. He merely shook his head reproachfully and scratched his beard. But at this point the intellectual type finally found his glasses, picked up his pole, and dashed lickety-split for cover, so the farmer was left in the middle of the roadway all on his lonesome—the only target, and a rather tempting one for the hairy snipers. The highly disadvantageous nature of this position was not slow in revealing itself. A dozen large shards crashed down, shattering at his feet, and smaller debris started drumming on his shaggy head and his shoulders.
“What the hell is all this?” the farmer roared. A new shard slammed into his forehead. The farmer stopped speaking and dashed lickety-split for his cart.
The cart was exactly opposite Andrei, and at first he thought the farmer would slump sideways onto it, send the whole damned shebang to blazes and race off to his swamps, as far away as possible from this dangerous place. But the man with the beard had no intention of sending the whole damned shebang to blazes. Muttering “You damn whores…” he started hastily unlashing the load on his cart with great dexterity. His broad back blocked Andrei’s view of what he was doing there, but the women in the house opposite could see everything—they all suddenly started squealing at once, slammed their windows shut and disappeared from sight. Before Andrei could even blink, the hirsute farmer had squatted down on his haunches, and a thick gun barrel, gleaming with an oily shimmer, rose up above his head, pointing toward the roofs.
“As you were!” Fritz roared, and Andrei saw him dash out from somewhere on the right, moving toward the cart in huge bounds.