Andrei gave her a light. The abrupt breaking off of the conversation had stirred up some kind of unpleasant sediment inside him—something had been left unsaid, something had been misunderstood, they hadn’t let him explain, unity hadn’t been achieved… And Kensi was sitting there looking sad somehow, and that was a rare thing for him. We think too much of ourselves, that’s what, he thought. The Experiment is all well and good, but everyone insists on doing things his own way, clings to his own position, and we have to do it together, together!
At this point Uncle Yura dumped a new batch of booze on the table with a thud, and Andrei gave up on the whole damn business. They drank a glass and took a bite; Izya threw out a joke and it fell flat. Uncle Yura flung out a joke too, a monstrously obscene one, but it was very funny. Even Wang laughed, and Selma was in stitches from laughing so hard. “In the pitcher…” she gasped, choking and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “It won’t fit in the pitcher!”
Andrei smashed his fist down on the table and launched into his mother’s favorite song:
They joined in with him, everyone trying his best, and then Fritz, with his eyes bulging wildly, bawled out a duet with Otto, a song that Andrei didn’t know, but an excellent one, about the quaking bones of the old, decrepit world—a magnificent battle song. Watching Andrei enthusiastically trying to sing along, Izya Katzman giggled and gurgled, rubbing his hands together, and then Uncle Yura fixed his drolly rakish, bright-eyed stare on Selma’s naked thighs and abruptly roared out in a voice like a bear:
This was an absolute hit, and Uncle Yura carried on:
At that Selma took her legs down off the armrest, shoved Fritz away, and said resentfully, “I’m not promising you anything. I don’t need any of you.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Uncle Yura, seriously embarrassed. “It’s not like I’ve got any use for you either.”
To smooth over the incident, they drank another glass. Andrei’s head started spinning. He was vaguely aware that he was fiddling with the phonograph, and he was going to drop it in a moment, and the phonograph really did fall to the floor, but it wasn’t damaged at all—quite the opposite. It seemed to start playing even louder. Then he was dancing with Selma, and Selma’s sides turned out to be warm and soft, and her breasts were unexpectedly firm and large, which was one helluva of a pleasant surprise—finding something beautifully formed under those formless folds of prickly wool. They danced, and he held on to her sides, and she took his cheeks in her open palms and said he was a really nice boy and she really liked him, and in his gratitude he told her that he loved her and he had always loved her, and now he’d never let her get away from him again… Uncle Yura slammed his fist into the table, proclaiming, “I feel a sudden chill in here, time for another glass of cheer.” Then he put his arms around Wang, who had completely wilted by this stage, and kissed him three times in the Russian fashion. Then Andrei found himself in the middle of the room, and Selma was sitting at the table again, throwing bread pellets at apathetic Wang and calling him Mao Tse-tung. That put Andrei in mind of the song “Moscow-Peking” and he immediately performed that beautiful composition with exceptional passion and fervor, then he and Izya Katzman suddenly found themselves standing, staring wide-eyed at each other, lowering their voices deeper and deeper in a sinister whisper and holding up their index fingers as they repeated, over and over: “Lis-tening to us! Lis-tening to us!” After that he and Izya somehow found themselves crammed into a single armchair, with Kensi sitting on the table in front of them, dangling his legs, while Andrei fervently tried to persuade him that he, Andrei, was willing to perform any kind of work here—that any work at all gave him especial satisfaction, and he felt just great working as a garbage collector. “Here I am—a garb-… age col-lector!” he exclaimed, enunciating the words with a struggle. “A grab-… grabbage collector!”
And Izya, spitting in Andrei’s ear, kept harping on about something unpleasant, something offensive: saying that Andrei actually experienced a sweet humiliation from being a garbage collector (“Yes… I’m a grab-bage collector!”), that he was so intelligent, so well read and capable, fit for much greater things, but even so he bore his heavy cross with patience and dignity, unlike certain others… Then Selma appeared, bringing him immediate consolation. She was soft and affectionate, and she did everything he wanted, and she didn’t contradict him, and at that point there was a sweet, devastating gap in his sense impressions, and when he surfaced from out of that gap, his lips were puffy and dry and Selma was already sleeping on his bed. He straightened her skirt with a paternal gesture, flung the blanket over her, adjusted his own attire appropriately, and went back out into the dining room, trying to walk with a brisk stride and stumbling on the way over the outstretched legs of poor Otto, who was sleeping on a chair in the hideously uncomfortable pose of a man killed by a shot to the back of the neck.
Towering up on the table was the large carboy itself, and all the revelers were sitting there, propping up their tousle-haired heads and warbling in a soft-voiced chorus, “In the desolate depths of the steppe a coachman was freezing…” and large tears were rolling down out of Fritz’s pale, Aryan eyes. Andrei was about to join in when there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and a woman wrapped in a shawl, dressed in her underskirt with boots on her bare feet, asked if the caretaker was here. Andrei shook Wang awake and explained to him where he was and what was required of him. “Thanks, Andrei,” Wang said after listening carefully to him, and left, feebly shuffling his feet. The others finished singing the song about the coachman in the steppe, and Uncle Yura suggested a drink “to folks at home not grieving,” but then it turned out that Fritz was asleep, so he couldn’t clink glasses. “That’s it, then,” said Uncle. “That means this will be the last one…” But before they drank one last glass, Izya Katzman, who had suddenly turned strangely serious, rendered one more solo—a song that Andrei didn’t entirely understand, but apparently Uncle Yura understood it perfectly well. The song included the refrain “Ave Maria” and an absolutely appalling verse that seemed to come from a different planet:
When Izya finished singing, there was silence for a while, then Uncle Yura abruptly smashed his massively heavy fist into the tabletop and swore at length in exceptionally florid style, following which he grabbed a glass and started swigging from it without any toasts at all. And Kensi, following some strange association that only he could understand, performed another song in an extremely unpleasant, squeaky, and vehement voice, about how, if the Japanese soldiers were all to start pissing at once against the Great Wall of China, a rainbow would appear above the Gobi Desert; about how the imperial army was in London today, tomorrow it would be in Moscow, and the next morning it would drink tea in Chicago; that the sons of Yamato had settled the banks of the Ganges and were catching crocodiles with fishing rods. Then he fell silent, tried to light a cigarette, broke several matches, and suddenly out of the blue told them about a little girl he used to be friends with in Okinawa—she was fourteen years old, and she lived in the house opposite his. One day some drunken soldiers raped her, and when her father went to the police to complain, gendarmes showed up and took him and the girl away, and Kensi never saw them again…