“Well, now,” sighed Antonina Sergeevna, “home is always best, who can argue? This year there was even butter in the stores, and in the work rations there’s always butter for 3.50 a kilo.”
“There was yeast,” affirmed Vasily Paramonovich.
“Yeast there was. And there’s always flour. I don’t know what else one needs. Veterans get raisins. Live as you please. Who needs any old Italy?”
“But he doesn’t travel of his own free will,” noted Vasily Paramonovich. “It’s for his job. And about writing that story— he’s right. That’s good. You write, young man, and you listen to me,” he recommended to Lyonechka. “I’ll give you a story too. Now, let’s say we take a certain comrade. A simple lad, a Russian. Served at the front, for that matter. Two wounds, but one of them’s not really serious, well, in the soft tissues, let’s say, that’s it. But the other’s worse. Yes. The second should be a bit more serious. But then, of course, that’s not the point, I leave that to your imagination. So he returns from the front, straight to the factory as a wire maker, the girls there are nice, there’s one particularly spunky one… but that’s also up to your imagination. That’s not the point. So, the years pass. They elect him to management. And the years pass. He’s in management, I can’t deny it. But! You see, the plot is that, well, they won’t move him up higher, not for anything. He soft-soaps Kuznetsov and Agafonov—I’m just giving an example—no soap. It’s like he’s caught his pants on a nail, to use the vernacular. What’s going on? he wonders. What’s going on? Yes… There’s a story for you. From real life. They’re always writing a lot of stuff and nonsense. Kisses. All beside the point. And when you’re in Moscow, you publish it—what I told you, this story. Those in the know—will be downright horridified, I tell you. There might even be disturbances. They might even have to bring in the troops. So you go easy on it, don’t overdo it. Keep the brakes on. Okay?”
On the eve of the Tulumbasses’ arrival, Olga Khristoforovna galloped through the town of R. on the kolkhoz steed with a black banner in her right hand and an ultimatum in her left. She demanded the abolition of money, of privilege rations and regular ration tickets, demanded the closing of special distribution order desks, the cancellation of exams in schools and universities, and proclaimed the emancipation of horses, dogs, and parrots, if it should happen that such were to be found in the personal use of the inhabitants of the town of R.; she demanded the destruction of fences, locks, keys, curtains, rugs, sheets, pillowcases with and without rickrack, pillows, feath-erbeds, house slippers, underwear, handkerchiefs, beads, earrings, rings, brooches and pendants, tablecloths, forks, spoons, tea and coffee china—with the exception of plain tea glasses— ties, hats, ladies’ purses, woolens, silk, synthetics, viscose, and nylon. Olga Khristoforovna permitted the inhabitants of the town of R. to keep for their personal use no more than one table, two stools, one zinc bucket, tin cups with handles (three), folding knives (two), one Primus stove with monthly registration, and one and a half cubic meters of firewood per family; blankets—one per capita; cigarettes and lighters—ad libitum.
Moreover, Olga Khristoforovna declared that she had renamed nature once and for all, on a global basis, and that henceforth the town of R. and the rest of the world would be granted August Bebel Autumn Rains, Vera Slutskaya Foggy Dawns, Nogin Clouds, Uritsky Sunrises, and Red Banner Snowstorms named after the Awakening Women of the Trans-Caucasus.
In conclusion, Olga Khristoforovna certified that her teaching was correct, because it was right.
It was in connection with Olga Khristoforovna’s dangerous behavior that a nearby military unit was called in to assist; this was made all the more necessary, Vasily Paramonovich explained, because in any event you could expect excesses on the part of the population: after all, there have been cases in which local hotheads have forced their way through to visiting sister regionals and demanded that they convey slander of one kind or another to the United Nations: whether it’s that the wheat is infected with beetles, or that horned fish are being sold and that they’re supposedly radioactive—whereas if the fish happen to have horns, then it’s for completely different, personal reasons known only to the fish—or that men’s socks end up in the margarine and it’s hard to spread on bread, which isn’t true. It spreads beautifully.
The Tulumbasses began arriving from the south, and from the north came an unlimited contingent of troops. Blimps hovered on high, decorated with mustachioed ears of wheat and a short accompanying text: “Oh, rye, rye!”—all the rest had been crossed out by the censor. Between the south, north, and on high, Olga Khristoforovna galloped like the spirit of vengeance, and the underground caverns, roaring with liberated hot water, sonorously responded to the blows of the horses’ hooves.
In anticipation of meeting the Tulumbasses the comrades in charge ascended the hill and Antonina Sergeevna demanded that we, as guests from the capital and partly relatives, also stand on the hill with kerchiefs and bread and salt in outstretched hands. Vasily Paramonovich had donned his sturdiest suit and his electronic watch; Akhmed Khasianovich had shaved three times and now worriedly fingered the quickly darkening bristle rushing to grow out again; Antonina Sergeevna looked as though she had recently died and been stylishly, expensively mummified—the cold wind blew on her curls, amongst which rollers, forgotten in her haste, could be fleetingly glimpsed. Perkhushkov was also around somewhere pretending to be either a boulder overgrown with late, frost-bitten plantains, or maybe that dead branch over there. The rowan-berry blazed, promising a stormy winter soon to come, and far off, as far as the eye could see, the distant woods were already yellow and reddish brown, enveloped in an autumnal haze.
And the gray vault of the heaven over us where the squadron howled, racing by with no place to land, and the distant brown forests, and the hill in the middle of the globe where we stamped our feet in the wind that blew salt out of the carved salt cellars, and the frozen earth, shuddering under the hooves of the raven black steed, invisible from here—at that moment all this was our life, our one and only, full, hermetic, real, palpable life. This is what it was and nothing else. And there was only one way out of it.
“No, this is not life,” Judy said suddenly in a loud voice, reading my thoughts, and everyone looked around in bewilderment. But she was wrong. This was life, life. This was it. Because life, as we were taught, is a form of existence of protein molecules, and anything else is just empty pretense, patterns on the water, pictures in smoke. All you have to do is accept this wise view and the heart won’t hurt so much, “and if it should— then just a little bit,” as the poet wrote. If only we dreamed a little less—life is cruel to dreamers. What had I done wrong? But I wasn’t even the issue. What had Judy done wrong: Judy who caught a cold on the hill in the town of R. and died two weeks later of pneumonia, not having given birth to Pushkin for us after all, not having encountered a single sick animal, Judy who vanished in vain? To tell the truth, she died like a dog, in a strange country, amid strangers to whom—why beat around the bush?—she was nothing but a burden. You remember her once in a while and think: who was she, what did she want, and what was her real name after all? And what did she think about these odd people who surrounded her, hiding, shouting, fearing, and lying—people white as beetle grubs, fly larvae, raw dough, people who would start babbling and waving their arms frantically, or suddenly stand stock-still at the window in tears, as if it were they who had gone astray in life’s thicket? And Uncle Zhenya—what had he done wrong, he who was torn into pieces, into basic protein molecules next to a waterfall in an alien land—a stick in his hand, an uneaten banana in his mouth, pain and bewilderment in his bulging diplomatic eyes? And truthfully, feeling a romantic kinship with him, I won’t judge him, as I will judge neither Olga Khristoforovna with her nightly spinsterish dreams of sabers and smoke and dappled steeds, nor Vasily Paramonovich, who was born to crawl, but flew with rapture like a child whenever possible, nor Svetlana, a simple Moscow girl with the appetite of a padishah.