Otto giggled piteously, took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, then immediately took fright and started trying to stuff the handkerchief back in the pocket, but kept missing.
“At El Alamein, I recall,” the colonel said good-naturedly, “my lads brought me a German lance corporal…”
The bell rang in the hallway again; Andrei apologized once more and went out, leaving the unfortunate Otto to be devoured by the British lion.
Izya had shown up. While he was kissing Selma on both cheeks, and wiping his shoes at her insistence, and being subjected to processing by clothes brush, Chachua and Dolfuss, with Madam Dolfuss, all tumbled in together. Chachua was holding Madam Dolfuss by the arm, dragging her along and deluging her with jokes as they walked, while Dolfuss trailed along behind with a wan smile on his face. In contrast with the temperamental head of the Chancellery for Legal Affairs, he seemed especially gray, colorless, and insignificant. He had a warm raincoat over each arm, in case it turned cold at night.
“Everyone to the table, to the table!” Selma chimed like a delicate little bell, clapping her hands.
“My dear,” Madam Dolfuss protested in a deep bass voice. “But I must tidy myself up!”
“What for?” Chachua asked, rolling his bulging eyes in astonishment. “Such great beauty—and you want to tidy it up? In accordance with article 218 of the Criminal Procedural Code, the law is resolutely opposed…”
The usual hubbub started up. Andrei couldn’t smile fast enough at everyone. Izya was seething and bubbling in his left ear, recounting something about a total screwup at the barracks during today’s combat alert, and right off the bat Dolfuss was droning in his right ear about lavatories and the main sewer, which was close to being blocked… Then they all piled into the dining room. As he invited, seated, cracked gags, and passed compliments, out of the corner of his eye Andrei saw the door of the study open and the smiling colonel emerge from it, stuffing his pipe into his side pocket. Alone. Andrei’s heart sank, but then Lance Corporal Otto Friese appeared—evidently he was simply maintaining a distance of five meters behind a senior officer, as prescribed by the drill regulations. A staccato clicking of heels began.
“Now we’ll drink and have a good time!” Chachua bellowed in a gravelly voice.
Knives and forks started clattering. After inserting Otto between Selma and Madam Dolfuss with some difficulty, Andrei sat down in his own seat and looked around the table. Everything was fine.
“And just imagine it, my dear, there was a hole this size in the rug! That’s a swipe at you, Mr. Friese, you beastly little boy!”
“They say that you shot someone in front of the ranks, Colonel?”
“And mark my words, it’s the sewerage system, the sewerage system that will be the ruin of our City some day!”
“So much beauty and such a small glass?”
“Otto, darling, stop worrying that bone… Here’s a good piece for you!”
“No, Katzman, it’s a military secret. I had more than enough bother with the Jews in Palestine.”
“Vodka, Counselor?”
“Thank you, Counselor!”
And heels clicked under the table.
Andrei drank two shots of vodka in quick succession—to get up steam—savored the snack that he followed it with, and joined everyone else in listening to a never-ending and fantastically indecent toast proposed by Chachua. When it finally turned out that the counselor of legal affairs was raising this tiny little glass with great big feelings, not in order to commend all the above-mentioned sexual perversions to the present company but merely to honor “my fiercest and most merciless enemies, with whom I have done battle throughout my life, and from whom I have suffered defeats throughout my life, that is—here’s to beautiful women!” Andrei burst into relieved laughter along with everyone else and downed a third shot. Madam Dolfuss gurgled and sobbed in absolute prostration, covering her face with a napkin.
Somehow everyone got tanked very quickly. “Yes! Oh, yes!” a familiar voice intoned at the far end of the table. Chachua, with his twitching nose suspended over Madam Dolfuss’s dazzling décolleté, kept talking without breaking off for a single second. Madam Dolfuss gurgled in total collapse, playfully shrinking away from him and heavily leaning her immensely broad back against Otto, who had already dropped his fork twice. Right beside Andrei, Dolfuss had finally left the sewerage system in peace, and lapsed into a state of official departmental elation at precisely the wrong time and in precisely the wrong place: he started recklessly giving away state secrets. “Autonomy!” he mumbled menacingly “The key to aun-… to aumon-… autonomy is chlorella! The Great Construction? Don’t make me laugh. What damned airships? It’s chlorella!”
“Counselor, Counselor,” said Andrei, trying to reason with him. “For goodness’ sake! There’s absolutely no need for everyone to know that. Why don’t you tell me how things are going with the laboratory block?” The maid took away the dirty plates and brought clean ones. The hors d’oeuvres had already been swept away, and the beef bourguignonne was served.
“I raise this tiny little glass!”
“Yes, oh yes!”
“Beastly little boy! It’s quite impossible not to love you.”
“Izya, stop pestering the colonel! Colonel, would you like me to sit beside you?”
“Fourteen cubic meters of chlorella is zero… Autonomy!”
“Whiskey, Counselor?”
“Why, thank you, Counselor!”
At the height of the merriment ruddy-faced Parker suddenly appeared in the dining room. “The president sends his apologies,” he reported. “An urgent meeting. He sends his very warmest greetings to Mr. and Mrs. Voronin and likewise to all their guests…” They forced Parker to drink a shot of vodka—for that the efforts of all-crushing Chachua were required. A toast was proposed to the president and the success of all his undertakings.
Things got a bit quieter and coffee was served with ice cream and liqueurs. Otto Friese tearfully lamented his failures in love. Madam Dolfuss told Chachua about darling Königsberg, at which Chachua nodded his nose and passionately intoned, “But of course! I remember… General Chernyakhovsky… They battered it with cannon for five days…”
Parker disappeared, and it was dark outside. Dolfuss greedily drank coffee and unfolded to Andrei’s gaze phantasmagorical projects for the reconstruction of the northern districts. The colonel was telling Izya a joke: “…He was given ten days for disorderly conduct and ten years’ hard labor for disclosing a state and military secret.” Izya sprayed, gurgled, and replied, “But that’s old stuff, St. James. In Russia they used to tell that one about Khrushchev!”
“Politics again!” shouted Selma, offended. She managed somehow to squeeze in between Izya and the colonel, and the old soldier paternally patted her little knee.
Andrei suddenly felt sad. He apologized into empty space, got up on numbed legs, and walked through into his study, where he sat on the windowsill, lit a cigarette, and started looking at the garden.
It was pitch dark in the garden, and the windows of the next cottage shone brightly through the black foliage. It was a warm night, with fireflies stirring in the grass. And what about tomorrow? Andrei thought. So I’ll go on the expedition, so I’ll reconnoiter… I’ll bring back a heap of guns, sort them out, hang them up… and then what?
In the dining room they were making a din. “Do you know this one, Colonel?” Izya yelled. “The Allied command is offering twenty thousand for Chapaev’s head!” And Andrei immediately remembered how it went on: “The Allied command, Your Excellency, could pay more. After all, they have the city of Guriev behind them, and Guriev has oil. Ha-ha-ha.”
“Chapaev?” the colonel asked. “Ah, that’s your cavalryman. But I think they executed him, didn’t they?”