I glanced around.
‘But where to, precisely?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said the baron.
I noticed that he was holding a heavy burnished-steel pistol, and I shuddered at the sight.
The baron laughed. ‘Pyotr, Pyotr. What’s the matter? You really should not be so very mistrustful of people.’
He thrust his other hand into his pocket and took out the package which Chapaev had given him. He unwrapped it and showed me a perfectly ordinary ink-well with a black stopper.
‘Watch carefully,’ he said, ‘and do not look away.’
With that he tossed the ink-well into the air and when it was about two yards away from us, he fired.
The ink-well was transformed into a cloud of blue spray and minute fragments which hung in the air for a moment before scattering across the table.
I staggered backwards, and in order to avoid falling from my sudden dizziness, I braced myself against the wall with one hand. I was facing a table covered with a hopelessly stained map, beside which Kotovsky was standing, his mouth wide open. Glycerine from the shattered lamp was dripping on to the floor.
‘Right then,’ said Chapaev, toying with his smoking Mauser, ‘now you understand what mind is, Grisha, eh?’
Kotovsky covered his face with his hands and ran out of the room. It was clear that he had suffered a powerful shock. The same, indeed, could have been said of myself.
Chapaev turned towards me and looked at me closely for a while. Suddenly he frowned. ‘What’s that on your breath?’ Chapaev barked. ‘Well, well, less than a minute goes by, and he’s drunk already. And why are you wearing a yellow hat? Trying to get yourself court-martialled are you, you bastard?’
‘I only had one glass…’
‘Qui-et! Quiet, I tell you! The weavers’ regiment is here, we have to settle them in, and you’re wandering around drunk! Want to put me to shame in front of Furmanov, do you? Go and sleep it off! And if I catch you pulling tricks like this again, it’s a court-martial, straight off! Do you want to know what my court-martials are like?’
Chapaev raised his nickel-plated Mauser.
‘No, Vasily Ivanovich, I do not,’ I answered.
‘Sleep!’ Chapaev repeated. ‘And on your way to bed don’t you dare breathe on anyone.’
I turned on my heels and walked to the door. When I reached it I glanced around. Chapaev was standing by the table and following my movements with an expression of menace.
‘I have just one question,’ I said.
‘Well?’
‘I just wanted to say…I have long known that the only real moment of time is “now”. But I cannot understand how it is possible to fit such a long sequence of sensations into it. Does it mean that if one remains strictly within the bounds of this moment, without creeping over into the past or the future, it can be extended to such a degree that phenomena like those I have just witnessed will become possible?’
‘And just where are you thinking of extending it to?’
‘I have expressed myself incorrectly. Does it mean that this moment, this boundary between the past and the future, is itself the door to eternity?’
Chapaev jiggled the barrel of his Mauser and I fell silent. He looked at me for some time with an expression of something close to mistrust.
‘This moment, Petka, is eternity, and not any kind of door,’ he said. ‘So how can we say that it takes place at any particular time? When will you finally come round?’
‘Never,’ I replied.
Chapaev gaped at me, wide-eyed.
‘Well, look now, Petka,’ he said in astonishment. ‘Have you really understood at last?’
Finding myself back in my room, I began wondering how I could occupy myself to best calm my nerves. I recalled Chapaev’s advice to write down my nightmares, and I thought about my recent dream on a Japanese theme. There was a great deal in it that was incomprehensible and confused, but even so I could recall almost every detail. It began in a strange underground train with an announcement of the name of the next station – I could remember the name and even knew where it had come from: there could be no doubt that my consciousness, following the complex rules that govern the world of dreams, had created it in the instant before I awoke from the name of the horse that some soldier was shouting under my window. Furthermore, this shout had been reflected in two mirrors simultaneously, becoming transformed, in addition to the name of the station, into the name of the football team from the conversation with which my dream had ended. That meant that a dream which had seemed to me to be very long and detailed had in reality lasted no longer than a second, but after that day’s meeting with Baron Jungern and the conversation with Chapaev, nothing could amaze me any more. I sat at the desk, set several sheets of paper in front of myself, dipped my pen into the ink-well and traced the following words in large letters across the top of the first sheet: ‘Next station “Dynamo”!’
I worked for a long time, but even so I managed to write down less than half of what I could remember. The details that flowed out from my pen on to the paper possessed such a glimmer of decadence that towards the end I could no longer be certain whether I was actually writing down my dream or already improvising on its contents. I wanted to smoke; I took my papyrosas from the desk and went out into the yard.
Downstairs everything was in a state of bustling activity, as some of the newly arrived men formed themselves into a column; there was a smell of pitch and horse sweat. I noticed a small regimental orchestra standing at the back of the column – a few battered and dented trumpets and a huge drum hung on a strap round the neck of a tall strapping lad who looked like Peter the Great without his moustache. For some reason which was incomprehensible to me, the sight of this orchestra filled me with an inexpressible, aching melancholy.
The formation was commanded by the man with the sabre scar across his cheek whom I had seen from my window. I recalled the sight of the snow-covered square in front of the station, the platform covered with red cloth, Chapaev slicing the air with his yellow-cuffed gauntlet and this man at the barrier nodding thoughtfully in response to the monstrous, meaningless phrases which Chapaev was showering on to the square formation of snow-covered soldiers. It was definitely Furmanov. He turned in my direction, but I ducked back into the doorway of the manor-house before he could recognize me.
I went upstairs to my room, lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I remembered the fat man with the shaven head and the beard who had been sitting by the fire in that world beyond the grave, and I recalled his name – Volodin. From somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory a large tiled room emerged with baths secured to the floor, with this Volodin squatting naked and wet like a toad on the floor beside one of them. I felt as though I were just on the point of recalling something else, but then the trumpets sounded in the yard, the regimental drum boomed out, and the choir of weavers that I remembered so well from that night on the train roared out:
The deadly black baron and the white hussars
Want us to bow to the throne of the Tsars,
But from Siberia to the North British Sea
The strongest of all is the Red Army.
‘Idiots,’ I whispered, turning my face to the wall and feeling tears of helpless hatred for the world welling up in my eyes. ‘My God, the idiots…Not even idiots – mere shadows of idiots…Shadows in the darkness…’
8
‘But just why exactly did you think they were like shadows?’ Timur Timurovich asked.
Volodin twitched nervously, but the tight straps securing his arms and legs to the garrotte prevented him from moving. There were large drops of sweat glistening on his forehead.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You asked me what I was thinking just at that moment. Well, I was thinking that if there was any external observer around there to watch, he’d probably have thought we weren’t real, that we were nothing but flickering shadows and reflections from the flames – I told you there was a camp-fir
e. But then you know, Timur Timurovich, it all really depends on the observer…’
The camp-fire in the clearing had barely begun to blaze and was not yet giving enough light to disperse the gloom and illuminate the figures sitting around it; they appeared to be no more than blurred spectral shadows cast on an invisible screen by the branches and sods of earth lying beside the fire. Perhaps, in a certain higher sense, that is precisely what they were – but since the last of the local neo-Platonists had abandoned his shame at possessing a body shortly before the Twentieth Party Congress, there was no one to reach such a conclusion within a radius of at least one hundred miles.
It would be better, therefore, to state the facts simply – sitting in the semi-darkness around the camp-fire were three hulking brutes. Their appearance, moreover, was such that if our neo-Platonist were to have survived the Twentieth Congress and all of the insights that ensued therefrom, and to have emerged from the forest and approached the fire to discuss his topic with the new arrivals, he would very probably have suffered severe physical disfigurement as soon as the word ‘neo-Platonism’ disturbed the silence of the night. The signs that suggested this to be the case were numerous.
The most significant among them was the ‘Toyota Harbour Pearl’ amphibious Jeep standing close by; another was the immense winch on its bonnet – an item of absolutely no use whatever in normal life, but frequently to be found on the vehicles of gangsters. (Anthropologists who have devoted their efforts to studying the ‘New Russians’ believe that these winches are used as rams during the settling of accounts, and certain scholars even see their popularity as an indirect indication of the long-awaited resurgence of the spirit of the nation – they believe the winches fulfil the mystical role of the figureheads that once decorated the bows of ancient Slavonic barks.) In short, it was clear that the people who had arrived in this Jeep were not to be trifled with, and it would be best not to risk uttering any superfluous words in their company. They were talking quietly among themselves.
‘How many bits does it take, eh, Volodin?’ one of them asked.
‘That depends on you,’ Volodin answered as he unwrapped a paper bundle on his knees. ‘For instance, I take a hundred at a time already. But I’d recommend you start with about thirty.’
‘And that’ll do it?’
‘That’ll do it, Shurik,’ said Volodin, dividing up the contents of the bundle, a dark heap of something dry and brittle, into three unequal portions. ‘You’ll end up running all over the forest trying to find a place to hide. And you’ll be running too, Kolyan.’
‘Me?’ the third person sitting by the fire asked in a deep bass. ‘And just who am I gonna be runnin’ away from?’
‘From yourself, Kolyan. From your own self,’ Volodin answered.
‘I ain’t never run away from no one,’ said Kolyan, picking up his portion with a hand that looked like the body of a toy dump truck. ‘You better watch your mouth. Why’d I wanna run away from meself? It don’t make no sense.’
‘I can only explain it by using an example,’ said Volodin.
‘Give us an example, then.’
Volodin thought for a moment.
‘Okay, just imagine some low-life scum comes into our office, sticks all his fingers up in the air and says we should be sharing. What would you do then?’
‘I’d drop him,’ said Kolyan.
‘You what? Right there in the office?’ Shurik asked.
‘That don’t matter. They gotta pay for givin’ us the fingers.’ Shurik slapped Kolyan on the shoulder, then turned to Volodin and said reassuringly, ‘Course not in the office. We’d set up a shoot.’
‘Okay,’ said Volodin. ‘So you set up a shoot, right? And then what happens? Let Kolyan answer.’
‘Clear enough,’ Kolyan responded. ‘We goes round there, and when that jerk turns up I says – right mate, give us all the dirt on yerself. He starts jawin’, and I waits a minute and nods my head, like, and then I blow him away…Yeah. And then all the rest too.’
He looked at the tiny mound of dark garbage on his palm and asked, ‘Just swaller it, just like that?’
‘Chew it properly first,’ said Volodin.
Kolyan dispatched the contents of his palm into his mouth.
‘Smells like mushroom soup,’ he stated.
‘Swaller it,’ said Shurik. ‘I’ve eaten mine, no problem.’
‘So you blow him away,’ Volodin said thoughtfully. ‘So what if he gets the drop on you two first?’
Kolyan pondered for a few seconds, working his jaws, then he swallowed and said confidently, ‘Nah, he won’t.’
‘Okay, then,’ said Volodin, ‘Where are you going to drop him, right there in his wheels, from a distance, or will you let him get out?’
‘I’ll let him gerrout,’ said Kolyan. ‘It’s only woodentops as drops jerks in their wheels. Holes everywhere, blood too – why go spoilin’ a nice set of wheels? The best kind of hit is when he comes over to our wheels.’
‘Okay, so let’s take the best case. Imagine he’s already got out of his wheels and comes over to yours and you’re just about to blow him away, when you see…’ Volodin paused significantly, ‘when you see it isn’t him standing there, but you. And you’ve got to blow yourself away. Don’t you reckon you might drop a marble or two?’
‘Sure I would.’
‘And when your marbles are bouncing, it’s not really chicken to kick into reverse?’
‘Course not.’
‘So you’d cut and run, because it wouldn’t be chicken?’
‘If it ain’t chicken, sure.’
‘So it turns out you’d be running away from yourself. Get it?’
‘Nah,’ Kolyan said after a pause, ‘I don’t get it. If it ain’t him, but me, then where am I?’
‘You’re him.’
‘Then who’s he?’
‘He’s you.’
‘Nah, I just don’t get it,’ said Kolyan.
‘Well, look,’ said Volodin, ‘can you imagine there’s nothing at all on every side of you, nothing but you? Everywhere?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kolyan. ‘I’ve been that way a coupla times from smack. Or after basing, don’t remember which it was.’
‘Then how are you going to blow him away, if there’s nothing around you except you? No matter which way you deal it, you end up planting lead in yourself. Dropped your marbles, haven’t you? Right. So instead of blasting him, you do a runner. So now try figuring that by numbers. Seems to me like you’ll end up running away from yourself.’
Kolyan thought for a long time.
‘Shurik’ll blow him away,’ he said, eventually.
‘That means he’ll hit you. You’re all there is.’
‘How come?’ cut in Shurik. ‘If I’ve still got all me marbles in place, I’ll blow the right guy away.’
This time Volodin had to think longer and harder.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t explain it that way. That’s not a good example. Just hang about a bit till the mushrooms come on, and then we’ll have another go.’
The next few minutes passed in silence. The threesome sitting by the fire opened a few cans of food, sliced some salami and drank some vodka, but it was all done without speaking, as though the words usually spoken to accompany such actions were petty and out of place against the background of something dark and unexpressed which united all present.
After the vodka the three men smoked a cigarette each, still without speaking.
‘How’d the spiel get on to that track anyway?’ Shurik suddenly asked. ‘I mean, like, about the shoot and the marbles?’
‘Volodin was sayin’ as how we would end up runnin’ away from ourselves through the wood when the mushrooms came on.’
‘Ah. Got you. Listen, why do they say that, “come on”? Where is it they come on from?’
‘You asking me?’ asked Volodin.
‘You’ll do right enough,’ answered Shurik.
‘I’d say they come on from inside,�
�� Volodin said.
‘How’s that then, you mean they’re sitting in there waiting all the time?’
‘Yeah, kind of. You could put it like that. And not just them, actually. We’ve got every possible high in the world inside us…Every time you down something or shoot up, all you do is set some part of it free. There’s no high in the drug, it’s nothing but powder or a few chunks of mushroom…It’s like the key to a safe. Get it?’
‘Hea-vy,’ Shurik said thoughtfully, for some reason circling his head around clockwise.
‘Yeah, real heavy,’ Kolyan agreed, and the conversation died for a few minutes.
‘Listen,’ Shurik put in again, ‘is there a lot of high down there inside?’
‘An infinite amount,’ Volodin said authoritatively. ‘An inexpressibly and infinitely large amount, there’s even a high you can’t tune into out here.’
‘Fuck me…You mean inside’s like a safe and this high’s stuck inside it?’
‘Roughly speaking, yeah.’
‘And can you blow the safe? Like, so as to get a lift outta the high inside it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How?’
‘You have to devote your entire life to it. Why do you think people go into monasteries and live all their lives there? You think they spend their time beating their heads off the walls? They’re on this incredible trip, the likes of which you couldn’t get out here from a fix for a grand in greens. And no stopping – get it? Morning, noon and night. Some of them even when they’re asleep. On and on for ever.’
‘Then what they trippin’ on? What’s it called?’ asked Kolyan.
‘It has various names. In general, I suppose you could call it grace. Or love.’
‘Whose love?’
‘Just love. When you feel it, you stop asking whose it is, what it’s for, why it exists. You just stop thinking altogether.’
‘And you’ve felt it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Volodin, ‘I’ve been there.’
‘So how’s it feel? What’s it like?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘Give us a rough idea. Is it like smack?’
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