It was better not to joke with the comrades from the house management committee. I kicked out Lyonechka’s pupils; the white cat left on his own, having talked the mice into voyaging with him—and that autumn, by the way, they were seen in the upper regions of the Volga; the cat walked, leaning on a staff in a garland of forget-me-nots, aloof; the mice, six of them, ran behind carrying their tiny belongings, salt and matches—I’m afraid that they lit campfires in inappropriate places, and we were to blame; and to add to it all, Uncle Zhenya—who had arrived at his appointed place, and had already strolled through the official rooms of his new dwelling, yanked on the windows, doors, locks, and blinds, checking for sturdiness, unpacked his suitcases with striped ties, checked ties, and peacock feather ties, explained to Aunt Zina how to use the air conditioner (“Zhenya! Hey, Zhenya! I don’t quite… I can’t figure it out!”)—Uncle Zhenya did not relax his vigilance for a second and sent Lyonechka a letter by diplomatic mail with a copy to Lyonechka’s parents, warning that Lyonechka should stop it (he knew what Uncle Zhenya was talking about) and shouldn’t even think of doing any such thing; that someone had already been warned and would follow through strictly, for he had been empowered to do so; and if Lyonechka didn’t turn over a new leaf, Uncle Zhenya would let it be known in certain quarters and then he’d really catch it. And Lyonechka shouldn’t think that just because Uncle Zhenya is in certain places he doesn’t give a hoot. No, it’s all very serious, because—you understand yourself, and especially now, when… well, precisely. There you have it.
Poor Uncle Zhenya—he wrote, he thought hard, and chose subtleties of meaning, but his death had already left the distant forests and, sniffing around, was running to meet him on soft paws, flexing its muscles. Uncle Zhenya finished writing, drank the coffee that was now available, and looked into the empty cup—and all the coffee grinds of the world, all the daisies, palm lines, pictures in distant stars and packs of cards with frowning kings and arrogant knaves had already fallen into the simple contour of a tombstone, trustingly revealing to Uncle Zhenya his imminent fate, but he couldn’t read it, for this knowledge was not given to him. And Uncle Zhenya sealed the envelope and daydreamed of the future’s fruits, of swimming in the sea, of new spare tires for a new car, of official reports and labyrinths of intrigue—he became lost in sweet thoughts of things that eventually came to pass, of course, but that no longer had the slightest relationship to him. It’s strange to think that he died almost at the same time as Judy, and that as he pierced the metaphysical heights, he may perchance have bumped into her in the gray light of otherworldly bodies and not recognized her.
Uncle Zhenya wasn’t joking: he pushed the buttons available to him, and in October—I remember the day: panic, Lyo-nechka’s shouts, Judy’s tears, and in the southern side of the sky that night, the distant, trembling dawn of Uncle Zhenya’s malicious delight—in October Judy was summoned to a certain unpleasant place, an official building, and it was suggested that she be so kind as to get the hell out, go wherever she liked, only get lost. Obviously, we didn’t sleep all night: Lyonechka gave Decembrist speeches, his sister Svetlana, in tight ringlets and heavily made up, ran back and forth from us to her parents (Mama was a real cow, and Papa was even more uncouth) despite the late hour (who knows, what if love were suddenly waiting around the corner) conveying, on the one hand, her brother’s radical plans: to marry, emigrate, leave for the north, for the south, for Mars, contrive an act of self-immolation on Pushkin Square, and so forth; and on the other hand—everything that one expects in such circumstances. When Svetlana informed us toward dawn that a telephone call had been placed to the Southern Hemisphere (they announced that “Lyonia something or other,” and he replied “call so-and-so”) all of us— lovers, Spiridonov, Svetlana, and I—took off in an undisclosed direction, as they say, and fought along the way. Svetlana wanted to head for the sea, since she really liked sailors and the gifts they bring to girls of Svetlana’s life-style; I proposed Friazino, where Mama had a little house, planted around with black currants and lupine; Lyonechka was attracted by the taiga (as usual, for ideological reasons); and as a result Spiridonov won, carrying us off to the town of R., where his sister Antonina Sergeevna was a bigwig in the city government.
Although the authorities in the town of R. lived better than simple people, as the authorities always do—for the May holidays they could sign up to buy marshmallows, Chinese towels, and even Stories of Burma in a colorful binding, and for the November holidays they got to stand on a heated tribune, sincerely waving their mittened hands to the freezing masses— and many simple people dream of such a life while tossing in their beds at night—still, the authorities have their dramas, too, and it seems to me that there’s no point in maligning or envying them from the word go. Antonina Sergeevna, who sheltered us, had to answer somewhere high up in her empyrean for the hot-water pipes, and when the asphalt in the town of R. began collapsing and people started falling irretrievably into the boiling water underground, the empyrean raised the question of Antonina Sergeevna’s responsibility for this unplanned broth. But, after all, the asphalt itself wasn’t under her jurisdiction, it was under the jurisdiction of Vasily Paramono-vich, and a stern warning should be issued to him, claimed the angered Antonina Sergeevna, slapping her palm on the light-colored, polished table in the office, and on the dark one at home. When the people collapsed, Vasily Paramonovich was absent, however—a general had invited him to Naryan-Mar to hunt the kolkhoz deer from a helicopter—and he most decidedly did not care to be sternly warned. He drew Antonina Sergeevna’s attention to his friendship with the general as if it added a lily-white cast to the pure pallor of his nomenclatural raiment; he hinted at such and such and also at this and that, and, deftly summarizing, juggling and shuffling everything, emphasized the fact that had Antonina Sergeevna’s pipes not rusted, the water would not have eroded Vasily Paramonovich’s asphalt. Correct? Correct. While this mutual bickering continued, the water undermined Akhmed Khasianovich’s trees, which fell over and squashed a couple of homeless dogs belonging to Olga Khristoforovna, for whom it was already time to retire on her special pension. Naturally, it was she who bore the brunt of responsibility in the end, since, as she was reminded, the department under her jurisdiction hadn’t shot its quota of ownerless dogs, and during that fiscal period these dogs had insulted the dignity of our people in the public squares and children’s playgrounds, and the dignity of our people is a golden, unchangeable currency, the pledge and guarantee of our continual, unquestioned success, our pride and joy, for it is better to die standing in boiling water than to live on our knees, picking up all kinds of I don’t even want to say what after her undisciplined dogs—mongrels, it must be stressed—and besides, it’s not altogether impossible that it was in fact her dogs that toppled the trees, dug up the asphalt, and gnawed through the hot pipes, which is what led to fourteen people boiling in our dear native earth—not an inch of which will we yield—moreover the Western radio programs are slanderously claiming that it was fifteen, but, ladies and gentlemen, they miscalculated— as always for that matter—since the fifteenth recovered and joined the work brigade of the blind workers’ cooperative that produces Flycatcher sticky tape, and the spurious slander of overseas stooges and the hysterics and yes-men of the right-wing emigres are only fit for the “Gotcha” column of the regional newspaper.