The square in front of City Hall was a seething vortex of panic. Vehicles drove up and drove away, policemen ran around, disoriented people wandered around in their underwear, and at the entrance some men had pressed some official or other up against the wall and were shouting at him, demanding something or other, while he tried to fend them off by jabbing with his cane and swinging his briefcase.
“What an unholy mess,” Donald said, and jumped out of the truck.
They ran into the building and immediately lost each other in a stupefying crowd of men in civilian clothing, men in police uniforms, and men in underclothes. The air was filled with the confused babble of innumerable voices, and the tobacco smoke made Andrei’s eyes smart.
“You’ve got to understand! I can’t, not like this—in nothing but my underpants!”
“…open the arsenal immediately and hand out guns… Damn it all, at least hand out guns to the police!”
“Where’s the chief of police? He was hanging around here just a moment ago…”
“My wife’s still in there, can’t you understand that? And my old mother-in-law!”
“Listen, it’s no big deal. After all, monkeys are just monkeys…”
“Just imagine it, I wake up and there’s someone sitting on the windowsill…”
“And where’s the chief of police? Still snoring in the sack, is he, the fat-ass?”
“We had one streetlamp in our alley. They knocked it down.”
“Kovalevsky! Room 20, quickly!”
“But surely you must agree that in just my underpants…”
“Who can drive? Drivers! Everyone out into the square, gather at the advertising column!”
“But where, damn it all, is the chief of police? Has he done a runner, the lousy bastard?”
“Right, listen up. You take some guys and get down to the foundry. Get those… you know, those rod things, for the park fencing… All of them, take them all! And get straight back here…”
“And I hammered that hairy face so hard, I broke my hand, I swear to God… And he yells, ‘God almighty! What are you doing? It’s me—Freddy!’ Total darned bedlam…”
“But are air rifles any good?”
“Three trucks to seventy-second district! Seventy-third district—five trucks…”
“Kindly give instructions for the issue of supplementary kit. Only it has to be signed for, so they’ll return it afterward!”
“Listen, have they really got tails? Or was I seeing things?”
Andrei was jostled, squeezed, and pressed up against the walls of the corridor, his feet were trampled black and blue, and he himself jostled people, squeezed through between them, and shouldered them aside. At first he looked for Donald, in order to be present as a witness for the defense at the confession and the handing-in of the gun, and then it hit home that the baboon invasion was obviously very serious business, if it had stirred up a hornet’s nest like this, and he immediately regretted that he couldn’t drive a truck, didn’t know where the foundry with the mysterious rods was, and couldn’t issue supplementary kit to anyone, and it seemed pretty much like he was no use to anyone here. He did at least attempt to inform people about what he had seen with his own eyes—maybe the information would prove useful—but some simply didn’t listen to him and others interrupted as soon as he began and started telling their own stories.
He realized with a heavy heart that there were no familiar faces in this eddying whirlpool of uniforms and underpants—he only caught a brief glimpse of Silva with his head bandaged up in a bloody rag before the black man instantly disappeared—but in the meantime measures of some kind were clearly being taken, someone was organizing someone else and sending him somewhere, the voices were getting louder and louder, sounding more and more confident, the underpants started disappearing little by little while the number of uniforms noticeably increased, and the moment came when Andrei even fancied that he heard the measured tramping of boots and a marching song, but it turned that someone had simply dropped the movable safe and it had gone tumbling and crashing down the stairs until it got stuck in the doorway of the Department of Foodstuffs…
And then Andrei did spot a familiar face: a functionary, a former colleague of his from the accounts department of the Office of Weights and Measures. Elbowing his way through people coming the other way, he overtook the functionary, pressed him back against the wall and blurted out in a single breath that he, Andrei Voronin—“Remember, we used to work together?”—was a garbage operative now; “I can’t find anyone, send me somewhere to do something, you must need people, surely…” The functionary listened for a while, blinking crazily and making feeble, convulsive attempts to break free, then suddenly he pushed Andrei away, yelling, “Where can I send you? Can’t you see I’m taking documents to be signed!”—and he took off down the corridor, almost running.
Andrei made several more attempts to participate in organized activity, but everyone rebuffed him or gave him the cold shoulder—everyone was in a terrible hurry; there was literally not a single person who was just standing there calmly and, say, drawing up a list of volunteers. With bitter resolve, Andrei started flinging open all the doors one after another, hoping to find someone or other in charge, someone who wasn’t running around, who wasn’t shouting and waving his arms about—even the most basic reasoning clearly indicated that somewhere around here there had to be something like a headquarters, a place from which all this feverish activity was being directed.
The first room was empty. In the second, one man in his underpants was shouting loudly into a telephone receiver and a second was cursing as he pulled on a regulation warehouse coat that was too tight. Protruding from under the coat was a pair of police breeches and ankle boots that had been patched over and over again, with no laces. Glancing into the third office, Andrei was lashed across the eyes by something pink with buttons and immediately recoiled, catching only a brief glimpse of a remarkably corpulent frame, clearly female. But in the fourth office he discovered the Mentor.
He was sitting on the windowsill with his feet pulled up, hugging his knees and looking out through the window into the darkness illuminated by the scudding light of headlamps. When Andrei came in, the Mentor turned a benign, florid face toward him, jerked his eyebrows up slightly, as he always did, and smiled. And at the sight of that smile, Andrei immediately calmed down. His rancorous anger faded away, and suddenly it was clear that everything was bound to sort itself out in the end; everything would fall into place and basically turn out just fine.
“Just look,” Andrei said, spreading his arms and smiling back. “It turns out that I’m no use to anyone. I can’t drive, I don’t know where the foundry is… I can’t understand a thing in all this crazy uproar.”
“Yes,” the Mentor agreed sympathetically. “It’s absolute mayhem.” He lowered his feet off the windowsill, stuck his hands under his thighs, and dangled his legs, like a child. “Quite unseemly, really. Even shameful. Serious adults, most of them experienced… So they’re not organized enough! Right, Andrei? So certain important matters have been allowed to slide. Inadequate preparedness, a lack of discipline… Well, and bureaucracy too, of course.”