“Gai Gaal,” Maxim happily repeated. “Gai is good.”
There was uproar, with all the women speaking at once. Rada started pestering Maxim, repeatedly asking him about something. She was obviously terribly interested in how Maxim knew Gai. Gai, Gai, Gai—the name kept surfacing in the torrent of incomprehensible words. The question about Maxim’s own surname was forgotten.
“Massaraksh!” the pudgy woman finally exclaimed, and burst out laughing. The girls started laughing too, and Rada handed Maxim her check bag and took him by the arm, and they walked out into the rain.
They walked to the end of that poorly lit side street and turned into an even more poorly lit side street, with crooked little wooden houses along the sides of a dirty road that was unevenly paved with cobblestones, then they turned another corner, and another. The crooked little streets were empty and they didn’t meet a single person along their way, lampshades of various colors glowed behind curtains in the weak-sighted little windows, and every now and then they heard muted music—choral singing in poor voices.
At first Rada chattered away in a lively fashion, often repeating the name Gai, and Maxim kept confirming that Gai was good, but he added in Russian that you shouldn’t punch people in the face, that it was strange and he, Maxim, didn’t understand it. However, as the streets became narrower and narrower, darker and drizzlier, Rada’s chatter broke off more and more often. Sometimes she stopped and peered into the darkness, and Maxim thought she was choosing the driest route, but she was searching for something else in that darkness, because she didn’t see the puddles, and every time Maxim had to gently tug her over onto the dry spots, and where there weren’t any dry spots, he took her under his arm and carried her across. She liked it, and every time she swooned in delight, but then immediately forgot about it, because she was afraid. The farther away they went from the café, the more afraid she was; at first Maxim tried to establish nerve contact with her, in order to transmit a little courage and confidence, but it didn’t work, just as it hadn’t worked with Fank. And when they left the slums behind and came out onto a completely muddy, unpaved road, with an endless, wet wall surmounted by rusty barbed wire running along on the right, and a pitch-black, foul-smelling wasteland without a single light on the left, Rada’s courage failed her and she almost started crying. In order to lift the mood at least a little, Maxim started singing the most cheerful songs he knew one after another at the top of his voice, and that helped, but not for long, only as far as the end of the wall, and then there were rows of buildings again—long, yellow two-story buildings with dark windows that gave off a smell of cooling metal, organic lubricant, and something else stifling and smoky. The sparse streetlamps glowed nebulously, and there were men in the distance, sullenly loitering under a tawdry sort of blind archway. Rada stopped.
She clutched Maxim’s arm and started speaking in a fitful whisper, full of fear for herself and even more for him. Whispering, she tugged him back, and he complied, thinking it would make her feel better, but then he realized it was simply an unreasoning act of despair, and dug his heels in. “Let’s go,” he gently told her. “Let’s go, Rada. Nothing bad. Good.” She obeyed him like a child. He led her on, although he didn’t know the way, and suddenly realized that she was afraid of those wet figures, and he was very surprised, because there was nothing terrible or dangerous about them—they were just ordinary members of the indigenous population, huddled up under the rain and shivering from the damp. At first there were two of them, then a third and a fourth appeared from somewhere with the little glowing lights of narcotic sticks.
Maxim walked along the empty street between the yellow buildings, straight at those figures, and Rada pressed herself closer and closer against him, and he put his arm around her shoulders. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he had been mistaken and Rada was trembling not in fear but simply from the cold. There was absolutely nothing dangerous about those wet men, and he walked straight past them, past those hunched-over, long-faced, chilled-through men with their hands stuck deep in their pockets, stamping their feet to warm themselves up, those pitiful men poisoned by their narcotic, and they didn’t even seem to notice him and Rada, they didn’t even raise their eyes, although he walked by so close that he could hear their morbid, irregular breathing. He thought that now at least Rada would calm down, now that they were already under the archway—and then suddenly another four men appeared out of thin air up ahead of them, as if they had detached themselves from the yellow walls, and stood across the path, blocking it; they were as wet and pitiful as the others, but one of them had a long, thick cane, and Maxim recognized him.
Under the flaking dome of the grotesque archway a naked lightbulb dangled, swinging to and fro in the draft. The walls were covered with mold and cracks, and the cracked concrete under their feet bore the dirty tracks of innumerable feet and car tires. There was a sudden hollow tramping behind them, and Maxim looked back—the first four men were pursuing them, breathing fitfully and irregularly, keeping their hands in their pockets and spitting out their repulsive narcotic sticks as they ran. Rada gave a muffled cry and let go of his arm, and suddenly the space was crowded: Maxim was forced back against the wall, and the men were standing just a hair’s breadth away, but they didn’t touch him, they kept their hands in their pockets, they didn’t even look at him, they just stood there, not allowing him to move, and over their heads he saw two of them holding Rada by the arms, and the man with the mustache strolled over to her, unhurriedly transferred the cane to his left hand, and in the same leisurely style lazily slapped her on the cheek with his right hand.
This was so barbarous and impossible that Maxim lost his sense of reality. Something shifted out of kilter in his consciousness. The men disappeared. There were only two people here, himself and Rada; the others had all disappeared. Their place had been taken by fearsome, dangerous animals, trampling in the mud with clumsy, terrifying movements. The city disappeared, together with the archway and the lightbulb above his head. This was a region of impassable mountains, the country of Oz on Pandora; this was a cave, an abominable trap set by naked, spotted monkeys, and the blurred, yellow moon was indifferently peering into the cave, and he had to fight in order to survive. And he started fighting just as he had fought that time on Pandora.
Time accommodatingly slowed down and stretched out, the seconds became very, very long, and in the course of each one it was possible to make very many different movements and strike many blows while seeing everything at once. They were heavy-footed, these monkeys, they were used to dealing with different quarry, and they probably simply weren’t quick thinking enough to realize that they had made the wrong choice, that the best thing for them would have been to run, so they tried to fight… Maxim grabbed one wild beast by the lower jaw, jerked up the yielding head, chopped the edge of his hand hard against the pale, pulsating neck, and immediately turned to the next one. He grabbed, jerked, and chopped, then grabbed, jerked, and chopped again—in the cloud of their stinking, predatory breath, in the hollow silence of the cave, in the yellow, weeping semi-darkness—and filthy talons tore at his neck and slipped off, yellow fangs sank deep into his shoulder and also slipped off… There was no one near him any longer, and the leader with the club was hurrying toward the exit of the cave—because, like all leaders, he had the fastest reactions and had been the first to realize what was happening—and Maxim fleetingly pitied him, because his fast reactions were so slow. The seconds stretched out, becoming even slower, the fleet-footed leader was barely even moving his legs, and Maxim, slipping between the seconds, drew level with him and chopped him down as he ran, and immediately stopped.