The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Yefim Davidovich Zozulya (1891–1941) was a Russian journalist and writer known for his satire and black humor. Zozulya began writing at the age of eighteen and in 1923 cofounded the journal Ogonyok and later organized a book series called Library Ogonyok. Zozulya’s “The Dictator: A Story of Ak and Humanity” is a tale in which the citizens who had originally agreed to a totalitarian government were then forced to prove that they deserved to exist. Inventive and unique, this political satire resulted in Zozulya’s arrest on more than one occasion. Upon his death in 1941, he left a number of unfinished short stories. Although his work attained some popularity before World War II, most of his work has not been republished and has gone untranslated into English until The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016). His “Gramophone of the Ages” is an anti-utopic story that illustrates the beauty of silence. This is the first time this story has been translated into English.

  Gramophone of the Ages

  Yefim Zozulya

  Translated by Ekaterina Sedia

  1. KUKS FINALLY REACHED HIS GOAL

  IT IS HARDLY POSSIBLE to thoroughly describe the appearance of Kuks the inventor and his work study, especially that particularly felicitous morning his old friend Tilibom came to visit.

  “What happened?” Tilibom opened his arms in wonderment. “Kuks, look at your nostrils turned inside-out, your red eyes, gray hair, and trembling hands! Look in the mirror! What happened to you?”

  “I am so happy!” Kuks closed his eyes, drowning in a smile. “For the first time in my life, I am perfectly happy. Of course I haven’t slept for sixteen nights straight and am completely out of my mind, but regardless, I am happy. You’re saying my nostrils are turned inside out? It seems possible—for eight days I’ve been sniffing a compound of my invention. But today, I am happy.”

  Sarcastic Tilibom, smiling slyly, said, “Have you finally finished your Gramophone of the Ages?”

  “You guessed it, Tilibom,” the scientist responded in his usual mild way. “You guessed right! Of course you don’t believe me now, but today I have prevailed. Yes, Gramophone of the Ages is finished. Completely finished.”

  Tilibom not only didn’t believe his friend, but he also felt sincere pity for him. He was quite sick of the forty-year story of this woebegone invention. Kuks had spent forty years trying to prove his theory that human voices, as well as other sounds, are recorded as invisible bumps on all inanimate objects near which they originated. Those bumps, according to Kuks’s theory, are preserved for millennia, and new sounds merely deposit on top of the old ones, creating layers—just like dust, sand, and many minerals in nature.

  To prove his theory, Kuks had promised to create an apparatus that would decode these deposits of sounds. This apparatus, combined with a perfected and more complex gramophone was meant to restore words of people long dead—billions of words of bygone generations…

  The task Kuks had set for himself was so grandiose and daring that two kings (Kuks started his work ten years before the total and universal socialist takeover in Europe) subsidized him, and a third king, more impatient than the other two, put him in jail. He was freed thanks to the insistence of the queen, who was known for her kindness, and transferred to a mental hospital.

  Nothing discouraged Kuks, and once he was free from the subsidies, jail, and mental institutions, kept working on his invention, and, as the reader would soon see, reached his goal after all.

  The Gramophone of Ages was complete. Kuks was not lying.

  2. THE AMAZING INVENTION

  Kuks’s old face, troughed with years, work, and suffering of a genius, was lit by a wandering tired smile.

  Tilibom stood still and felt his skepticism melting like ice cream under the spring sun.

  There was something in Kuks’s distracted smile more convincing than mere facts and in any case more convincing than words.

  Tilibom capitulated. “Come on, Kuks, show me the apparatus.”

  But too late! Kuks had already fallen asleep.

  The happy inventor slept for thirty-five hours straight and was woken up by his own scream. He dreamed that someone was breaking, and stomping on, his wondrous invention.

  He jumped up from the deep chair in which he slept, rubbed his eyes, and looked around: in his study, there was no one, and his apparatus, the creation of which had cost him almost his entire life, sat still, with an innocent, secretive, and indifferent look of any machine.

  Kuks telephoned Tilibom to summon him, and the two friends embarked on examining and testing the wondrous apparatus.

  Kuks grew unusually animated as he ran around the Gramophone of the Ages and addressed every screw as if it was alive. “Calm down, you.” He wagged his finger at a tiny cog that looked like a half-opened mouth of an idiot. “I triumphed over you, aha! Sixteen years you defied me, and now I am your master, ha ha! Now you know your place. See, patience and labor conquer all.”

  The appearance of the Gramophone was unpleasant: it resembled a giant spider, with snakelike pipes winding all around it.

  From its sides, wide vise-like levers stuck out like dead fish heads. Everywhere black wire was sticking up, like tough unshaven beard, and next to the tiny white dome crowning the contraption with its single blue eye, a large lopsided shell was tied on, like an ear.

  “How do you like it?” Kuks rubbed his hands in excitement.

  “It’s all right, an interesting doohickey,” Tilibom answered, noncommittal.

  3. “THE GRAMOPHONE OF THE AGES” AT WORK

  The tentacles, levers, and pipes of the apparatus were adapted for fitting into its case. Once there, the Gramophone had the appearance of a normal photo camera, and was quite easy to carry around.

  “Where should we start?” asked Kuks.

  “Wherever you want. But we have to do some robust testing. There is no hurry, no one is paying us! And not like you need a patent: you just have to present this to the Academy, but we can’t do that without a good thorough trial.”

  Tilibom’s jokes were not very original—no one used money for a long time now, just like the patents, and even quips about them had stopped being funny.

  “It’s great that there’s no money though.” Kuks sighed. “Much better than getting handouts from kings and fat cats, be they forever cursed, and then having to go to their galas and birthday parties and mince among their hangers-on, fools and nobodies, having to smile and congratulate them, to lower yourself with flattery. Ah, this is how I wasted my youth! Such frivolous nonsense…”

  “That’s enough, old friend! We have business at hand, let’s get started!”

  “I already listened to everything in my study…I even heard what the masons were saying as they laid down these walls.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “Judging by the content of their discussions, this house was built twenty or thirty years before socialism triumphed. First of all, they of course swore. Then two argued about the party line disagreements. Then they came to blows. Two face slaps were quite resonant, and the machine picked them up very clearly. Then the building remained unfinished for quite a while—it served as an embrasure, or a barricade, or somesuch. The machine deafeningly shoots, screams, moans, weeps, in many voices. I think that the building was empty for five years or so, during the Revolution and the following wars and the manufacturing lull right after, but it was finished soon after all that. They finished it with songs and laughter, with bracing sonorant sounds of willing, joyful labor…I listened to the sound biography of the construction, this symphony of the rising building with great interest…but come on, so many interesting discoveries still await us!”

  “Well, if you are telling the truth, try the apparatus in your dining room, I have to hear it right away! This sounds like a fairy tale,” Tilibom said, frantic. “You already heard your study and I want to hear your din
ing room.”

  “All right.” Kuks brought over his apparatus, fussed with it, stepped aside, and invited Tilibom to sit down.

  “The Gramophone of the Ages” shook, hissed, and started…

  Words—dozens, hundreds, thousands—wound onto the thin, plaintive, unending moan of the metal cylinder.

  Everyday words, conversations, exclamations, footfalls, slamming doors, laughter, sobs…

  * * *

  —

  Then suddenly a loud child’s cry.

  “That’s my Nadya weeping,” Kuks said softly. “When Manya, my wife, passed away. And this—this is the voice of my deceased, can you recognize her?”

  Tilibom, pale and perturbed by the miracle, nodded. He stood and listened, his mouth hanging open. The shell of the machine spat out words and sentences. “Hello! Have a sit, please. It’s a bit stuffy, I’ll crack the window.”

  “My husband is so busy.”

  “Always so, so busy.”

  “Nadya! Nadya! Dress warm.”

  Thousands of mundane exchanges, but both listened with bated breath.

  And then—strong and brash voice of young Tilibom. “Maria Andreyevna, Manya, Manechka, I love you! Love you so much! I cannot stand to see that old fool, your husband, that insane…I feel such pity for you. Manya, I love…you.”

  Tilibom buried his face in his hands.

  Kuks stared at the floor. The machine continued to weave an unending ribbon of words, sentences—so clear, merciless, terrifying, and innocent. Different.

  In that living stenography there was, by the way, this moment: “Who was here? That bastard Tilibom again? I am so sick of his talentless snout! So sick!” (That was Kuks saying that relatively recently.)

  Five hours passed without them even noticing. The friends grew weary.

  Both heard many unflattering things about themselves, said at various times by the other. Tilibom tried to seduce his friend’s wife more than once, but it turned out that she was seduced by other friends…

  Soon all that was eclipsed by other people, those who used to live in this house earlier. And against the backdrop of the life sounds—misery and joy, laughter and despair—personal hurts and betrayals seemed insignificant and small.

  “Your hand!” Kuks smiled kindly as he approached Tilibom. “See, we are worth each other. But let’s forget all that. This is the past. Twenty years we have been living in the socialist utopia, and yet we continue to be so small, so underhanded….But our children are different already. Your son, Tilibom, is not like you at all.”

  “Yes, Kuks, my son is different, and the next generation will be spectacular. Even now, in just twenty years, the makeup of the future people has changed already. We, Kuks, will think it strange, but that’s to be expected. The future people will be more naive than we are, healthier and stronger and more pure…but most importantly, happier.”

  “This is not all, and not quite,” Kuks added. “The future humans will be smarter than we are, despite their naivete. Yes, my friend, simply more intelligent. You are mistaken thinking that you are so clever with your spectacular cynicism. But cynicism is the greatest indiscrimination, mixed with the deepest indifference, and both are birthed only of weakness, of impotence. The new humans won’t need to be cynical; they will be intelligent, generous and proud, because above all they will be strong. Look at some of the young people’s faces—their eyes are so clear, their moral cores are so solid, their features are distinct, and their souls are sensitive.”

  “Yes, oh yes!” Tilibom rejoiced that an unpleasant conversation took such an unexpected turn. “The new people will be resplendent. And even we, old dogs, just for their mere proximity are becoming better and more sensible. If your damn ‘Gramophone of the Ages’ exposed us twenty years ago, would we be so calm?”

  The friends stared at the floor for a while, deep dark wrinkles furrowing their weary faces. In these wrinkles, there was an invisible and great change happening—a new thought, a new life was plowing the old dirt, looking for fertile soil for new seedlings…

  “Who knows,” Tilibom sighed, thoughtful. “Perhaps we don’t need hundreds of years to overcome human weaknesses, the ones we thought were so ingrained.”

  “Of course, a lot less,” Kuks agreed.

  4. PEOPLE ASPIRED TO GREATNESS BUT LIFE WAS ALREADY BEAUTIFUL

  In year 19__ during the tenth year of pan-European socialism, a law was passed that forbade any rooms or building that did not allow in the natural sunlight. Thousands of old, dank, and dark houses were demolished; some of the sturdy ones were refitted with glass roofs and ceilings, and the most sunless ones were equipped with special mirrors that transferred sunlight.

  And that year sun shone like never before, and, like never before, it illuminated and gladdened. The city, drowning in greenery and mirrors, seemed a sea of light and joy from an aeroplane, and on the ground that impression grew even more bright and vividly colored.

  The dawn was greeted by the factory horns and whistles, and orchestras. Some factory chimneys in some of the city’s neighborhoods still had the installations from the 1920 hungry and heroic Petersburg. Each apparatus produced a single powerful note, and all of the chimneys together deafeningly played fine melodies. Nowadays, only a few neighborhoods still had these installations, and they had their own special fans—the old revolutionaries.

  The new generation started their own orchestras, using the same principle. Each building—residential or business—had a powerful relay of musical scales, harmonious with the scales in the neighboring houses.

  And so this bright, powerful music greeted the sun, woke up the workers, and sent them on their way to work, lunch break, and home.

  The factories and workshops were cozy nests, fitted with every convenience, and inviting to joyful labor and creativity.

  The city was governed by the councils—but because they were so numerous, being a council member did not excuse one from work. The order was protected by the rotation of ordinary citizens, after the police has been abolished. Criminality shrank to unheard-of in human history lows: in the largest cities there were no more than ten murders a year, and most of those were the crimes of passion, or committed by those with pathologies. Every year the numbers decreased. The courts were nearly obsolete; they were replaced in 19__ by much softer “Abilities and Callings Chambers,” in which people were brought for lazy, unproductive work. They were trying to figure out the causes of such abnormal attitude toward labor, and tried to find in each accused his true calling and find him a more fitting and fulfilling work.

  For the most retrograde, there were special “Experience Workshops,” in which the students tried their hand at different endeavors. The question of abilities and callings was one of the most pernicious problems in socialist daily life. Even back in 1919 in the young and still feeble Socialist Russian Republic, all workers of social occupations were asked what were their professional inclinations, and what they would like to do. That question was more complex than anyone had expected, and the complete solution was not yet found after the first twenty years of the socialist society. Quite sizable groups had trouble finding themselves.

  But how could the society help them?

  One of the following chapters will offer the reader some idea of the “Abilities Chambers,” since the scientist Kuks, famous for his dedication to his work, was among those helping others to develop this important for work and creativity quality.

  5. KUKS DOES NOT SEPARATE FROM “THE GRAMOPHONE OF THE AGES” AND HIS INVENTION BECOMES FAMOUS IN THE CITY BEFORE THE ACADEMY

  Kuks became one with the apparatus. He would not let it go, and Tilibom was close behind.

  “Look, what genius, what delight!” Kuks said with admiration.

  Indeed, the second half of the twentieth century was a bright epoch, and streets and houses were f
illed with joy, ease, and peace.

  Wide sidewalks were alive with a mass of people.

  This era had created a new type of person: the city dweller of this epoch was sturdy and lean, lithe and light-footed. The shapes of clothes were distinguished by their streamlined simplicity—there was not a trace of the complicated jackets and tailcoats people used to wear in the beginning of this tumultuous century, clothes that made men look like birds, and women—dressed in their multicolored rags—like dolls. Every heart, every soul, every pair of eyes rejoiced looking at the new men and women, the loose shapes of their garments, at their happy faces, clear eyes, and white teeth of the girls.

  Suddenly the streets flooded with something vibrant, multivoiced, fresh, and delightful—children.

  There were several thousand of them; tanned and half-naked, joyful, singing and laughing, they were heading outside of the city for a hike and lessons. Those who were still little, weak, or tired, rode on greenery- and flowers-wreathed carts.

  Bracing, wild and joyful air emanated from the rapid procession of the children. As they went, the procession grew larger—the children who lived separately in the enormous “Children’s Palaces” were joined by those who visited their parents for a sleepover.

  Kuks and Tilibom saw the morning march of the children many times before, but every time they admired it anew. Just like an old forest denizen, who had long become accustomed to its fresh air, still relishes breathing it with full chest and finds word to express his admiration.

  “Great! So wonderful!” Kuks and Tilibom burst out in turn.