Izya suddenly turned right around toward him and said, “So, the story is that they lived here under the rule of the Kindest and Simplest. Both words with capital letters, note. They had a good life, plenty of everything. Then the climate started changing and temperatures fell sharply. And then something else happened and they all died. I found a diary here. The man who wrote it barricaded himself in his apartment and starved to death. Or rather, he hanged himself—after he went insane… It all started when this sort of shimmering appeared outside…”
“When what appeared?” Andrei asked, and stopped tugging off his shoe.
“Some kind of shimmering appeared. Shimmering! And if anyone got caught in that shimmering, they disappeared. Sometimes they managed to shout out, but sometimes they didn’t even have time for that; they simply dissolved into thin air—and that was it.”
“Crazy bullshit…” Andrei growled. “Well?”
“Anyone who went out of the house died in that shimmering. But at first the ones who got frightened and realized they were in really deep shit stayed alive. At first they talked to each other on the phone, and then they gradually started dying off. After all, they had nothing to eat, it was freezing outside, and they hadn’t laid in any firewood, the heating wasn’t working…”
“And where did the shimmering go to?”
“He doesn’t write anything about that. I told you, he lost his mind at the end. The last entry he made is this…” Izya rustled the papers. “Here, listen: ‘I can’t go on. There’s no point anyway. It’s time. This morning the Kindest and Simplest walked along the street and glanced in at my window. It’s the smile. It’s time.’ That’s all. And note that his apartment is on the fifth floor. The poor wretch hung a noose from the ceiling lamp… It’s still hanging there, by the way.”
“Yes, sounds like he really did go insane,” said Andrei, getting into bed. “That’s the starvation, for sure. Listen, what about water, is there anything?”
“Nothing so far. Tomorrow, I think, we ought to walk to the end of the aqueduct… What’s this, going to bed already?”
“Yes, and I recommend you do the same,” said Andrei. “Turn down the lamp and clear out.”
“Ah, listen,” Izya said plaintively. “I wanted to read for a bit longer. You’ve got a good lamp here.”
“And where’s yours? You’ve got one just like it.”
“You know, it got broken. In the sled… I stood a crate on it. By accident…”
“You cretin,” said Andrei. “All right, take the lamp and leave.”
Izya hastily rustled his papers and moved out his chair, then he said, “Ah yes! Duggan brought your pistol back. And he passed on a message from the colonel for you, but I’ve forgotten…”
“OK, let me have the pistol,” Andrei said. He stuck the pistol under his pillow and turned over onto his side, with his back toward Izya.
“How about I read you a letter?” Izya asked in a cajoling voice.
“Get out,” Andrei said calmly.
Izya giggled. Lying with his eyes closed, Andrei heard the rustling as he bustled about, gathering up his papers, and the creaking of the dried-out parquet. Then the door squeaked, and when Andrei opened his eyes, it was already dark.
Some kind of shimmering… Mmm, yes. Well, we’ll have to see how it goes. There’s nothing we can do about that. We have to think about the things we can control… There wasn’t any shimmering in Leningrad, there was bitter, atrocious, hideous, freezing cold, and people who were freezing to death cried out in the icy entranceways—hour after hour, getting weaker all the time… He used to fall asleep listening to someone calling out, and wake up to the same hopeless call, and he couldn’t have said it was frightening; it was more sickening, and in the morning, when he walked down the stairs that were flooded with frozen shit, muffled right up to his eyes, to get water, holding his mother’s hand, the one that was pulling the little sled with a bucket lashed to it, that person who had been calling out was lying down at the bottom, beside the elevator shaft, probably still where he fell the day before, it had to be the same spot—he couldn’t get up or even crawl, and absolutely no one had come out to him… And no shimmering was needed. We only survived because my mother was in the habit of ordering firewood in the early spring instead of in summer. The firewood saved us. Twelve adult cats and a little kitten that was so hungry, when I tried to stroke it, it pounced on my hand and started greedily chewing and biting my fingers. I’d like to send you there, you bastards, Andrei thought about the soldiers with sudden malice. That was no Experiment… And that city was more terrible than this one. I would definitely have gone insane. What saved me was being so young. The little children simply died…
And they didn’t surrender the city after all, he thought. Those who stayed gradually died off. They stacked them in the woodsheds and tried to get the living out—the authorities were still in control and life carried on—a strange, delirious life. Some people just died quietly, some committed acts of heroism, and then they died too… Some slaved in a factory to the bitter end, and when the time came, they died too… Some grew fat on all this, buying valuables, gold, pearls, and earrings for scraps of bread, and then they died too—they took them down to the Neva and shot them, then walked back up, not looking at anyone, slinging their rifles on their flat backs… Some hunted with axes in the side streets and ate human flesh and even tried to trade in it, but they died too anyway… In that city nothing was more ordinary than death. But the authorities still functioned, and while the authorities functioned, the city stood.
I wonder, did they feel sorry for us at all? Or did they simply not think about us? Did they just carry out orders, and the orders were about the city, with nothing about us? That is, there was something about us, of course, but only under point “P for Population”… At the Finland Station, trains of suburban-line railroad cars stood under a clear sky that was white from the cold. In our car there were lots of kids just like me, about twelve years old—some sort of orphanage. I remember almost nothing. I remember the sun in the windows, and the steam of people’s breath, and a child’s voice that kept repeating the same phrase over and over, with the same helpless, squealing intonation: “You fuck off out of here!” And then again: “You fuck off out of here!” And again…
Wait, that’s not what I was thinking about. Orders and compassion—that was it. Take me, for instance: I feel sorry for the soldiers. I understand them very well and even sympathize with them. We selected volunteers, and above all else, of course, the volunteers were adventurers, hotheads itching for action, who were bored to tears in our well-run City and fancied the idea of seeing somewhere completely new, getting to play with an automatic rifle when they got the chance, looting ruins, and then when they came home, stuffing their pockets with bonus money, tacking new stripes on their uniforms, and strutting their stuff with the girls… And instead of that… they get diarrhea, bloody blisters, and spooky crap… Anyone would mutiny!
But what about me? Is it any easier for me? Did I come here for the diarrhea? I don’t want to go on either, I don’t see anything good up ahead either, and I had hopes of my own, too, dammit! My very own Crystal Palace just over the horizon! Maybe I’d only be too glad right now to give the order: That’s it, guys, pack up and turn back! I’m sick and tired of all this filth too, aren’t I? I’m afraid too, dammit—of that shimmering, or those people with iron heads. Maybe the sight of those people with no tongues froze my insides solid: there it is, a warning—don’t go that way, you fool, go back… And the wolves? When I was alone in the rear guard—because you were all so afraid you crapped your pants—do you think I enjoyed walking back there? They can just come darting out of the dust, rip off half your ass, and disappear… So there you have it, my dear friends, my dear bastards: you’re not the only ones having it tough; I’m all dried out and cracked inside from thirst too.