4
Late that evening Maxim realized he had seen quite enough of this city, and he didn’t want to see any more, but he did want to eat something. He had spent the entire day on his feet and seen a quite extraordinary number of things, without understanding very much at all, but simply by listening he had learned several new words and identified several of the local letters on signs and posters. The unfortunate incident with Fank had bewildered and startled him, but overall he was glad to have been left to his own devices once again. He liked his independence, and he had missed it all the time he was stuck in Hippopotamus’s five-story termite hill with its poor ventilation. After thinking for a while, he had decided to temporarily get lost. Politeness was all very well, but information was more important. Of course, the first contact procedure was a sacred business, but no better chance to gather independent information was likely to come his way.
The city had astounded him. It was huddled down close against the ground. All the traffic here moved either across the ground or under the ground, and the gigantic spaces between buildings and above buildings were left empty, abandoned to the smoke, rain, and mist. The city was gray, smoky, colorless, and somehow the same everywhere—not because of the buildings, which included some rather beautiful ones, not because of the uniform teeming of the crowds on the streets, not because of the incessant dampness, and not because of the incredible lifelessness of its unrelenting stone and asphalt. Its sameness sprang from something more basic than all that. It was like a gigantic clockwork mechanism, in which none of the component parts are identical but everything moves, turns, engages, and disengages in a unified, endless rhythm, any change in which signifies only one thing: malfunction, breakdown, and stoppage. Streets with tall stone buildings were succeeded by small streets with little wooden houses; swarming crowds were succeeded by the magnificent emptiness of broad public squares; gray, brown, and black suits under elegant capes were succeeded by gray, brown, and black rags under tattered, faded cloaks; regular, uniform droning was succeeded by the sudden, frenzied blaring of car horns, howling, and singing; all of this was interconnected, rigidly interlinked, and predetermined since time immemorial by certain unfathomable, internal functional correlations, and nothing had any independent significance. All the people looked just the same, they all acted in exactly the same way, and the moment you could get a close look and grasp the rules of crossing the streets, you vanished, dissolving into all the other people, and you could move along in the crowd for a thousand years without attracting the slightest attention. This was probably a complicated world, controlled by many laws, but Maxim had already discovered one of them, the main one: do what everybody else does, and do it in the same way as they do it. For the first time in his life he wanted to be like everybody else.
He saw some individuals who behaved differently from everybody else, and these people filled him with a keen sense of revulsion—they barged their way across the flow, staggering and grabbing at people coming toward them, slipping and falling, they had a repulsive and surprising smell, and other people shunned them but left them alone. Some of these individuals even lay stretched out beside walls in the rain.
Maxim also did as everybody else did. Moving with the crowd, he flocked into the echoing public emporiums under dirty glass roofs; moving with everybody else, he emerged from these emporiums; moving with everybody else, he went down under the ground, squeezed into overcrowded electric trains, and went hurtling off somewhere with an incredible rumbling and clattering; swept onward with the torrent, he then came back up onto the surface, into new streets exactly like the old ones; when the flow of people divided, Maxim chose one of the streams and went whirling away with it…
Then evening came, the feeble streetlamps came on, hanging high up above the ground and not illuminating anything, and the large streets became completely congested. In the face of this congestion Maxim retreated and found himself in an almost empty, dimly lit side street. That was where he realized he’d had enough for today and stopped.
He saw three glowing golden spheres, a blinking blue sign woven out of gas discharge tubes, and a door leading into a semi-basement area. He already knew that as a rule three golden spheres were used to indicate places where food was served. He walked down the chipped steps and saw a small dining area with a low ceiling, ten empty tables, a floor that had just been sprinkled with fresh sawdust, and a glass buffet laden with brightly lit bottles of liquids in all the colors of the rainbow. There was almost no one in this café. A pudgy elderly woman in a white jacket with the sleeves turned up was sluggishly moving around behind a nickel-plated barrier beside the buffet; a little distance away a diminutive but sturdy man with a pale, square face and a thick black mustache was sitting at a round table in a casual pose. There was no one here shouting, or teeming, or emitting narcotic fumes.
Maxim walked in, chose a table in a niche as far away as possible from the buffet, and took a seat. The pudgy woman behind the barrier looked in his direction and said something in a hoarse, loud voice. The man with the mustache also glanced at him with vacant eyes, turned away, picked up a tall glass containing a transparent liquid that was sitting in front of him, took a sip, and set it back down. Somewhere a door slammed and a pretty young woman in a white, lacy apron appeared in the room, looked around to find Maxim, walked over to him, leaned on the table with her fingers, and started looking over his head. She had clear, delicate skin, a light down on her upper lip, and beautiful gray eyes. Maxim debonairly touched the tip of his nose with his finger and said, “Maxim.”
The girl looked at him in astonishment, as if she had only just noticed him. She was so sweet that Maxim couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear, and she smiled too, pointed to her nose, and said, “Rada.”
“Good,” said Maxim. “Supper.”
She nodded and asked something. Maxim nodded too, just to be on the safe side. He smiled as he watched her walk away—she was slim and light, and it was pleasant to recall that this world also had beautiful people in it.
The pudgy woman at the buffet uttered a long, querulous phrase and retreated behind her barrier. They adore barriers here, thought Maxim. They have barriers everywhere. As if everything here were high voltage. At this point he realized that the man with the mustache was looking at him, and looking at him in an unpleasant, unfriendly kind of way. And on closer inspection, the man himself had a generally unfriendly air about him. It was hard to say exactly what the issue was, but for some reason he aroused associations with either a wolf or a monkey. So let him stare. We won’t worry about him…
Rada appeared again and set down a plate of steaming meat-and-vegetable mush and a thick glass mug of frothy liquid in front of Maxim.
“Good,” said Maxim, and slapped the chair beside him in invitation. He very much wanted Rada to sit there for a while as he was eating and tell him about something, so that he could listen to her voice for a while, and she could sense how much he liked her and how good he felt being beside her.
But Rada only smiled and shook her head. She said something—Maxim made out the word “sit”—and walked away to the barrier. A pity, thought Maxim. He took the two-pronged fork and started eating, trying to compose a phrase expressing friendliness, liking, and a need for companionship out of the thirty words that he knew.
Standing there, leaning back against the barrier with her arms crossed, Rada kept glancing at him. Every time their eyes met, they smiled at each other, and Maxim was rather surprised that every time Rada’s smile became paler and more uncertain. He himself was experiencing very mixed feelings. He enjoyed looking at Rada, but this sensation was mingled with a growing sense of disquiet. He had a feeling of satisfaction from the food, which proved to be surprisingly delicious and quite hearty, but at the same time he could sense the sidelong glance of the man with the mustache and unmistakably discern the pudgy woman’s disapproval emanating from behind the barrier… He took a cautious sip from the mug—it was beer, cold and fresh, but rather too strong. Not for everyone.