“Yes,” Saat informed, coming up onto the porch.
There is nothing worse than living close to the village Soviet or the school, Matamey thought. Anything happens and there they come crawling to you as if you were holy Mecca. He yawned langorously.
Saat, unshaven and now looking easily over fifty, sat down on the bench and asked for a smoke. It was a hot July morning, and the chickens, turkeys and other fowl already seemed worn out. In the distance the mountains exuded a light greyish mist through cool ravines. The day promised to be sultry.
“You knew our principal, of course?” Saat asked.
“What do you mean, ‘knew,’? I know him very well.”
“I say ‘knew’ because I’m not sure he’s still alive.”
Matamey was flabbergasted. “Andrey Butba dead?” he exclaimed. “But I just saw him last night!”
“I don’t insist he’s dead,” Saat corrected himself. “But I can’t prove he’s alive either. Something strange happened to him. That’s why I came running to you so early in the morning. Were it not for that I’d be digging in my garden now. It’s just the right season to tie up the tomatoes and give the beds a good watering. Because if we have a drought I’ll have to toil in the garden every day from sunrise to sunset and maybe even nights.”
“We said, ‘goodbye’ about ten last night,” Matamey recalled aloud. “He told me he wanted to work a little longer in his office.”
“My woman saw him this morning. So pale he was! I bet he didn’t sleep the whole night. He sprinkled some water on his face at the well and told her not to look for him. ‘I can’t go on any longer,’ he said to her. He said he was running off into the mountains—maybe even farther.”
“Farther than the mountains?” Matamey wondered.
“That’s what he said.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Who can tell, Matamey? He wasn’t a bad fellow. Fooling around with his books all the time. Even nights. Now that’s carrying it to far,” Saat opined.
“All mathematicians are a little crazy,” Matamey said.
“Why should they go out of their minds?” Saat asked with a smile. “Maybe they figure each number is a ruble? Can you imagine, two million? Of what? Rubles? Every night?”
“But why just two million?”
“I don’t know,” Saat drew deeply on his cigarette. “Maybe a hundred and fifty. Maybe as many rubles as kilometers to the sun.”
Matamey washed in a hurry, combed his hair, and put on his walking slippers. “I am ready,” he declared. “Let’s go.”
His mother only managed to see his hat as he closed the squeaking gate. The milk remained untouched.
2
The principal’s office was locked. According to Selma, Saat’s wife, the light had been on all night in one of the classrooms, in the seventh grade, to be exact.
“How do you know?” Matamey asked. “Did you get up at night?”
“No,” Selma explained. “The office is clean but the classroom is smoky.”
“She has a nose like a hound,” Saat acknowledged. “If she says so, you may be sure it is so.”
The seventh grade classroom bore the marks of an all-night job: a blackboard motley with mathematical formulas, papers littered over the desk and on the students’ pulpits, cigaret butts on the floor, and an empty matchbox. The air was stuffy.
“He must have had the windows closed,” Matamey said.
“He never liked fresh air,” Selma pointed out.
“He was afraid of catching cold,” Saat added.
Matamey picked up several notebook leaves—nothing but formulas. On the desk—formulas too. Velocities in kilometer-hours, distances in thousands of kilometers, powers in H.P.’s, and on the globe there, dotted trajectories shooting out from some unknown point, each marked with Roman numerals. Beside the globe, a chart—apparently to measure distances and velocities.
“What was he figuring?” the secretary wondered.
“Who knows,” Saat said.
“Didn’t he ever tell you anything?” Matamey asked Selma.
Selma, a withering woman, first shook her head in denial. “He was a strange man, though,” she added cautiously.
“We know that.”
“Besides,” she went on, “I never listened to him much anyway. Only when he told me to light the fire in the oven or sweep the floor …”
“Yah, yah,” the secretary of the village Soviet became annoyed. “Yah, we know all about lighting fires or sweeping floors, but this here, dear Selma, is a matter of much greater importance.”
Selma frowned. What is of greater importance than floors or an oven? she thought. That young official thinks too much of himself.
“Please think, what else did he tell you?” the janitor prodded his wife. “Think harder.”
“If I think harder, there’s nothing really. All sorts of junk.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Matamey said while looking through papers and studying attentively the mathematical equations on the board, “I’ve no doubt that our principal was working on some complicated calculations. As I can see, he was doing some research on flights.”
“On flights, really?” Saat asked in astonishment.
“I remember now,” Selma suddenly cheered up. “Only yesterday morning Andrey was telling me that in a few minutes one could fly as far as … I just can’t remember how far …”
“Here’re the flight plans,” Matamey showed the couple a circle encompassed with dotted trajectories.
“Nothing but foolery,” Saat decided.
Selma remembered something else, something that had seemed to come in one ear and go out the other. “He said the earth we live on is crowded as a yard.”
“What kind of yard, esteemed Selma?”
“A schoolyard.”
Saat chuckled. “If you ask me, Andrey’s senses went farther than his mind. No man of reason will start claiming that the earth is small. Just try and hike around the earth by foot, why, even our district. You’ll get nothing but corns and wear out more than half a dozen shoes. To tell you the truth, I had been noticing something funny about our principal for quite some time.”
“What for instance?” Matamey wanted to know, still studying Andrey Butba’s notes.
The janitor recalled a conversation between himself and Andrey of about two weeks earlier. A huge moon had been hanging in the sky, and while his wife had been sleeping like “a sack of wheat,” he couldn’t doze off. The principal had seemed exhausted. In the moonlight he looked like a man made of clay. His eyes, two glowing embers on a pale face, had drawn Saat’s particular attention. Of course, the janitor started to speak about the weather, namely that on a beautiful night like this one felt like soaring up like a bird.
“Like what?” the principal had asked, as if he hadn’t heard.
Saat had repeated his thought about the bird.
The principal sat down on his haunches, pulled out a pencil and began to draw some lines on the ground. What he drew the janitor couldn’t remember now nor had he been giving them any special notice. As a true son of the soil, a man of beds and green stems, Saat was an alien to any abstraction or even romanticism once it tended to tear him away from his fenced-in vegetable garden.
That night Andrey Butba had seemed to be reading some invisible letters. He had been talking in precise, clipped sentences, separating them by a fair amount of pauses. “Saat,” he had said, “let’s assume that the speed of flying machines in one year will increase by twenty to thirty percent. Now, the speed of three “M” gives already more than three-and-a-half thousand kilometers per hour. But that’s not the limit. Rocket planes can cover almost the whole earth in half an hour. But that’s not the limit either. Listen, Saat, don’t you think the earth is getting cramped?”
“Cramped? What do you mean, esteemed Andrey?”
“Very simple. Cramped like a prison cell. Only a few steps from corner to corner. Do you understand now?”
“No,”
Saat had frankly admitted.
“Well, how else shall I explain it? It’s like, don’t you feel crowded on your vegetable plot?”
Saat had laughed out heartily. “Esteemed Andrey, on my vegetable plot I feel like on a shoreless sea—from one bed of tomatoes to the next planted with radishes its as far as from here to the Dardanelles. So help me. And why? Because I love my garden and adore the soil. I’m like a worm in the earth, so tiny, that sometimes I think I need a telescope.”
“Crazy.”
“I don’t care. Maybe I am. And what makes me crazy? The earth.”
“Listen Saat, how can you talk about a little spot of ground as if it were the universe?”
“And why not?”
“Come on, you’re not a worm.”
“And why not?”
“You just want to make me furious.”
“I’m not sure who’s doing which, esteemed Andrey.”
“It’s incredible, Saat. You call a plot of ground the universe, or even a planet. Our globe is a tiny part of the universe and that piece of earth growing five kilos of cucumbers and maybe that much of radishes …”
“Kindly do not insult my garden,” Saat interrupted. “To me it’s dearer than life.”
“And what about the universe?”
“What universe?”
“Our galaxy.”
“What the devil do I need it for? I’ve got enough of my few spans of earth where I feel like a king’s uncle.”
“Don’t you ever feel cramped, Saat?”
“Me cramped? Me? Never!” Saat had emphatically declared. “It’s amazing, when I enter my garden and the gate squeaks behind me like a kitten, I’m telling you, I feel very good … Very good indeed.”
Andrey Butba had shaken his head sadly. “Absolutely no co-ordination of space,” he had said, as if to himself. “A pitiful attachment to a two-dimensional world. A pithecanthropus view of reality …”
“I don’t understand you, Andrey.”
Saat hadn’t felt good that night. In the end it had dawned upon him that the principal was a sick man.
Selma agreed with her husband. “Andrey thought the whole world was too crowded for him,” she concluded.
“The whole world?” Matamey found it incredulous.
“Yes, the whole world.”
“Wait a moment, here’s a note,” Matamey picked up a slip of paper from the floor. He read it carefully, then looked from Selma to her husband. They’re telling the truth, he thought. Once again he read the note, unquestionably Andrey’s.
“All right,” he told Selma, “collect all these papers, everyone of them, and keep them in a safe place. The militia may want to look at them, and now, Saat, I think we ought to go and look for our principal.”
“Look for him where?”
“I don’t know myself where,” the secretary of the village Soviet said. “If one is to agree with what Andrey wrote on that note, the whole world is one big jail cell, and our principal might be at this moment even as far as the end of the world.”
The husband and wife glanced at each other.
“I’m sorry for him,” Selma said. “Thirty already and no living soul in the world. Always alone. And all those papers. That’s enough to make you lose your marbles.”
“With a wife he’d have gone off his head much sooner,” Saat observed. “Your family isn’t that much of a honey pot.”
The woman didn’t argue with her husband. This toiler drudging in his soil from morning to night, she thought, could also use some of God’s wisdom.
The men left.
3
It was a sweltering sun. Matamey and Saat crossed the schoolyard and took shelter under an acacia tree growing at the gate. It was cool in the shadow; one found it hard to believe that the great fire in the sky was still scorching the earth.
The secretary of the village Soviet was contemplating the plan of action. He was reluctant to stir up a commotion about the mysterious disappearance of the principal who, after all, was a co-villager and neighbor. Besides, Andrey might not have disappeared, he might have decided to go to town on a Sunday.
“Saat,” he suggested, “let’s for the time being keep the whole matter between the two of us.”
“Oh sure, sure,” the janitor agreed.
The village store was no more than a hundred paces away. It may be a good idea to stop in at the trading post and possibly pick up some news, Matamey thought.
“If we have no rain everything will burn out to a crisp,” Saat pondered aloud.
“Everything but your little garden,” Matamey countered.
“Yes, I’ll have to save it,” the janitor consented. “I’ll water it every night, even if I have to carry the water in my mouth. I won’t let it die.” They were slowly walking to the store.
“Saat,” Matamey asked, “is there anything in the world you love more than your garden?”
Saat considered the reply for a moment. “No,” he declared.
“That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“It’s good that you’re like that, Saat.”
“You may laugh as much as you want, but my soul is in the garden.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“I’ll never understand that Butba,” the janitor went on. “Maybe he’s a saint and I’m an arrant sinner. It must be either or. There he goes climbing somewhere up to the skies and me, I feel blissful staying here on earth. Do you understand, Matamey? Fresh cheese, hot hominy and fresh fruit—what else does a soul need?”
“Nothing else, according to you. Isn’t that so?”
“Absolutely a null nil.”
“That’s a thought worth mulling over,” Matamey said, walking up onto the concrete step of the village store.
Behind the counter, as usual, stuck out the lean, lanky storekeeper Kadyr Eshba, a fellow who seemed not to belong to this village store where the ceiling was low and all the commercial activity limited to a trade of low finances. Eshba’s humped nose and thin neck might look good in a flourishing city univermag but never here in this shanty which always smelled of sour milk and household soaps.
“Good morning, Kadyr,” Matamey announced. “How’s life? How’s business?”
The storekeeper’s reply was curt but to the point—a raised index finger of his right hand.
“That’s good,” Matamey said. “It’s a pleasure to see a man who always greets you pleasantly and each time in a different way.”
“Our Kadyr will never cheat anybody,” Saat remarked obsequiously, sitting down on an empty nail box.
“You see,” Kadyr explained, “every time you’re about to cheat somebody you stop and think. And you refigure again and again. You’ve got to have a head for that … And you always ask yourself, what for? Do you really have to?”
It was a quiet morning, with no buyers around, and that had set Eshba in a philosophical frame of mind.
“I see they haven’t given you the jitters yet today,” Matamey said. “You’re still in a good mood.”
“Right you are,” the store manager agreed. “You’re my first customers if I’m not to count the school principal who showed up quite early, almost at daybreak.”
Matamey and Saat exchanged knowing glances. “What did he want so early in the morning?” the secretary of the village Soviet pretended indifference.
“Bread, sugar,” Kadyr said. “He also bought a knapsack, like the one tourists buy. I had it lying around for a whole year …”
“A knapsack?” Matamey perked up. “What did he want with that?”
“He said he was going up to the mountains.”
“Where?”
“Up to the mountains,” the storekeeper repeated. “Toward Suipsara.”
“For long?”
“That he didn’t tell me.”
Matamey leaned against the counter. “You see, Kadyr,” he confided, his head on his elbows, “our principal is not at school. Please tell us where he is; we need him desperat
ely.”
Saat nodded in agreement.
“But I’ve told you where,” Eshba said. “He’s on Suipsara, that is, not there yet, on his way there.”
“What would he want there?” Matamey asked in a hollow voice.
The country Mercury did not know that. “It might be just for a little walk,” he suggested. “Something like a tourist, it’s quite fashionable nowadays …”
“A little walk?” Matamey couldn’t hide his astonishment. “By himself? Without telling anyone?”
“He was very absentminded,” Kadyr spread his stalklike arms. “Hadn’t brought any money with him. I had to give it to him on credit.”
“Why didn’t he run over for the money. It’s just next door.”
“Andrey was terribly rushed.”
“To climb the Suipsara? Without money? Didn’t you think that was rather strange, Kadyr?” the secretary of the village Soviet demanded.
“No. Now I do, though,” Eshba admitted.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Matamey said. “Between us, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”
Kadyr crossed his arms and gaped at Matamey.
“He wrote up a lot of little paper slips,” Saat remarked.
“What kind of paper slips?”
“Just paper slips, from a notebook.”
There was the noise of a car outside. The obese doctor Daj Bganba scrambled out of the vehicle. In spite of his forty years and generally-known gluttony, the doctor still looked spry and fit. People who ought to know maintained that it could have been worse, as a matter of fact so bad that no truck would have been able to hold him up.
“Greetings to an honest group,” the doctor boomed. “I’m at your mercy, Kadyr. Save me. A bottle of mineral, please, I beg you.”
“After last night?”
“Doctor?” Matamey asked. “Which way are you going?”
“Into town.”
“Will you give us a lift to the mill?”
“Unquestionably.”
The doctor rinsed his throat, emptied two bottles of mineral (his usual ration), and after throwing a few coins on the counter, he wheelbarrowed his belly toward the car. Strangely enough, though, when the car rolled out onto the road, it moved rather smartly, without a hitch.
Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966 Page 23