Selma suddenly started singing in a high voice, “And next morning Katya was awoken by her mother… Get up, get up, Katya. The ships at anchor ride…” But she was immediately interrupted by Chachua’s velvety roar: “I brought you flowers… Oh, what wonderful flowers… You didn’t take those flowers from me. Why didn’t you take them?”
Andrei closed his eyes and suddenly remembered Uncle Yura with an unusually keen pang of yearning. Wang wasn’t here at the table, and Uncle Yura wasn’t here… And what the hell, I wonder, do I need this Dolfuss for? He was surrounded by ghosts.
Donald was sitting on the couch in his battered cowboy hat. He crossed one leg over the other and firmly clasped his fingers around his pointed knee. Grieve not in leaving, rejoice not in arriving… And Kensi sat down at the desk in his old police uniform, propping his elbow on the table and setting his chin on his fist. He looked at Andrei without condemnation, but there was no warmth in that glance either. And Uncle Yura kept slapping Wang on the back and intoning, “Never mind, Wang, don’t you grieve now, we’ll make you a minister, and you’ll ride around in a swanky ‘Victory’ automobile…” There was a familiar, heart-wrenching smell of coarse tobacco, healthy sweat, and moonshine. Andrei managed to catch his breath with an effort, rubbed his numbed cheeks, and looked at the garden again.
The Building was standing in the garden.
It stood there solidly and naturally among the trees, as if it had been there for a very long time, since forever, and it intended to stand there until the end of time: four stories of red brick, and just like the other time, the windows of the first floor were covered over with shutters, the roof was covered with galvanized sheeting, a flight of four stone steps led up to the door, and a strange, cross-shaped aerial stuck out beside the only chimney. But now all the Building’s windows were dark, in some places on the ground floor the shutters were missing and the windowpanes were streaked with dirt and cracked, in some places the panes had been replaced with warped sheets of plywood, and in some places they were crisscrossed with strips of paper. And there was no more solemn, somber music—a heavy, stifling silence crept out of the Building like an invisible mist.
Not taking even a second for reflection, Andrei flung his legs over the windowsill and jumped down into the garden, into the soft, thick grass. He walked over to the Building, frightening away the fireflies, burrowing deeper and deeper into the dead silence, keeping his eyes fixed on the familiar brass handle on the oak door, only now that handle was dull and covered in greenish splotches.
He walked up onto the porch and looked back. In the brightly lit windows of the dining room, human shadows merrily leaped about, twisting into fantastic poses, the sounds of dance music reached him faintly, and for some reason there was a clatter of knives and forks again. Dismissing all that, he turned away and took hold of the damp chased brass. The hallway was dimly lit, damp, and musty now; the branching coat stand protruded from the corner, as naked as a withered tree. There was no carpet on the marble stairway; there were no metal rods—all that was left on the steps were the green, tarnished rings, old yellowed cigarette butts, and some indefinite kind of trash. Treading heavily and hearing nothing but his own steps and his own breathing, Andrei slowly walked up to the top landing.
The long-extinct fireplace gave out a smell of old soot and ammonia, and something was stirring about in it with a faint rustling and scurrying. The immense hall was just as cold—he felt a draft on his legs—black, dusty rags hung down from the invisible ceiling, the marble walls were covered with dark, messy, suspicious-looking patches and glinted with dribbles of damp, the gold and purple had sloughed off them, and the haughtily modest busts of plaster, marble, bronze, and gold looked blindly out of their niches through clumps of dirty cobwebs. The parquet under Andrei’s feet creaked and yielded at every step, squares of moonlight lay on the littered floor, and ahead of him a gallery he had never been in before stretched onward and inward. And suddenly an entire swarm of rats shot out from beneath his feet, darted along the gallery with a pattering of paws, and disappeared into the darkness.
Where are they all? Andrei thought in confusion as he wandered along the gallery. What has become of them? he thought as he walked down rumbling iron steps into the musty inner depths. How did all this happen? he thought as he walked from room to room, with crumbled plaster crunching, broken glass squeaking, and dirt, covered in fluffy little mounds of mold, squelching under his feet… and there was a sweet smell of decomposition, and somewhere water was ticking, falling drop by drop, and on the tattered walls there were huge black pictures in mighty frames, but he couldn’t make out anything in them…
Now it will always be like this here, Andrei thought. I’ve done something—we’ve all done something—that means it will always be like this here. It won’t move from this spot again, it will stay here forever, it will rot and decay, like an ordinary dilapidated building, and in the end they’ll smash it apart with iron balls, they’ll burn the garbage, and take the burnt bricks off to the garbage dump… There isn’t a single voice. Not even a single sound, apart from rats squealing in despair in the corners…
He saw a huge cupboard with shelves and a rolling shutter and suddenly remembered there used to be a cupboard exactly like it standing in his little room—six square meters of floor space, with a single window looking out into an enclosed yard like a well shaft, and with the kitchen beside it. There were lots of old newspapers lying on the cupboard, and rolled-up posters that his father used to collect before the war, and some other old paper trash… and when a mousetrap smashed the face of a huge rat, it somehow managed to climb onto that cupboard and rustled and scrabbled up there for a long time, and every night Andrei was afraid that it would fall off onto his head, and one day he took a pair of binoculars and looked from a distance, from the windowsill, to see what was going on there, in among the paper. He saw—or did he imagine that he saw?—two jutting ears, a gray head, and an appalling bubble, gleaming as if it had been varnished, instead of a face. This was so terrifying that he darted out of his room and sat on the trunk in the corridor for a while, feeling the weakness and nausea inside him. He was alone in the apartment, there was no one there to make him feel embarrassed, but he was ashamed of his fear, and eventually he got up, went into the large room and put “Rio-Rita” on the gramophone… And a few days later a sweetish, nauseating smell appeared in his little room. The same smell as here…
In a vaulted chamber as deep as a well shaft he glimpsed the strange, surprising gleam of the leaden gray pipes of a huge organ, long since dead, cold, and dumb, like some abandoned graveyard of music. And close to the organ, beside the organist’s chair, a little man was lying, huddled up tight and shrouded in a ragged carpet, with an empty vodka bottle glinting by his head. Andrei realized that everything really was over, and hurried back to the way out.
He walked down from the porch into his garden and saw Izya, who was exceptionally drunk and somehow especially disheveled and mussed. He was standing there, swaying, holding on to the trunk of an apple tree with one hand and looking at the Building. In the twilight his bared teeth glittered in a frozen smile.
“It’s over,” Andrei told him. “It’s the end.”
“The delirium of an agitated conscience!” Izya mumbled indistinctly.
“Nothing but rats running around,” said Andrei. “Rotten.”
“The delirium of an agitated conscience…” Izya repeated, and giggled.