‘You just keep on trashing my brains over and over again,’ said Shurik. ‘Can’t you just tell me straight out how I turn into him?’
‘I told you, if you could just turn into him like that, then everybody would have been tripping long ago. The problem is that the only way to become the fourth guy is to stop turning into all the others.’
‘You mean you have to turn into no one?’
‘You have to stop being no one too. You have to not become anyone and stop being no one at the same time, get it? And the moment you’re in there, you’re off tripping, quicker than a flash. And it’s for ever.’
Kolyan gasped quietly. Shurik gave him a sideways glance. Kolyan was sitting motionless, as though he had turned to stone. His mouth had turned into a triangular hole, and his eyes seemed to have turned inwards.
‘You sure pile it on, for real,’ said Shurik. ‘I’ll start leaking marbles any moment.’
‘Let them leak,’ Volodin said gently. ‘What do you need those marbles for anyway?’
‘Nah, that’s no good,’ said Shurik. ‘If I drop all my marbles, then you soon won’t have no marbles either.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Volodin.
‘Just you remember who your cover is. Me and Kolyan, isn’t it? Isn’t that right, Kol?’
Kolyan didn’t answer.
‘Hey, Kolyan!’ Shurik shouted.
Again Kolyan didn’t answer. He sat there by the fire with his back held straight up, gazing straight ahead, but not looking at Shurik sitting there in front of him, or Volodin slightly to his left. It was obvious that he wasn’t looking at them at all, he was gazing into nowhere. But the most remarkable thing of all was that a column of light had appeared above his head, reaching far up into the heavens.
At first glance the column looked like no more than a narrow thread, but the instant Shurik and Volodin started paying attention to it, it began expanding and growing brighter – and yet somehow it didn’t illuminate the clearing or the men sitting by the fire, it only illuminated itself. Then it took in the fire and the four people sitting round it, and suddenly they were surrounded by this light, and there was nothing else around them at all.
‘Fuck me!’ The sound of Shurik’s voice came from every side.
In reality, there weren’t any sides at all, or any voices either. Instead of the voice there was a certain presence, which announced itself in a way that made it clear it was Shurik. And the meaning of the announcement was such that the best words for expressing it were clearly ‘fuck me!’.
‘For real. Volodin, can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ Volodin answered from everywhere.
‘Is this the eternal high then?’
‘Why are you asking me? Look for yourself. You know everything now, you can see everything.’
‘Yeah…What’s this stuff all around us? Ah, yes, that’s it…of course. But where’s everything else gone to?’
‘It hasn’t gone anywhere. Everything’s where it should be. Try looking a bit harder…’
‘Oh, yeah. Kolyan, where are you? How you doing?’
‘Me!’ came the response from the glowing void. ‘Me!’
‘Hey, Kolyan! Answer me!’
‘Me!!! Me!!!’
‘So that’s how it all really is, eh? Who’d have thought it?’ Shurik went on, excited and happy. ‘I’d never have guessed. Listen, Volodin, don’t even bother to answer, I’ll get it myself…Who could ever have imagined it? No way could anyone ever imagine this! No way, not ever! No way, no how!’
‘Me!!!’ responded Kolyan.
‘Turns out there’s nothing to be afraid of in the world,’ Shurik went on. ‘Absolutely nothing at all. I know everything, I can see everything. I can see and understand anythin’ you like. Why, even…Well, well, well…Listen, Kolyan, we didn’t ought to have wasted Kosoy that time. He never took the dough. It was…So it was you took it, Kolyan!’
‘Me!!! Me!!! Me!!! Me!!!’
‘Cut the spiel,’ Volodin interrupted, ‘or we’ll all get thrown out.’
‘Why, the rotten bastard,’ yelled Shurik, ‘he threw everyone a curve.’
‘Cut it out, I said. This isn’t the time. Better take a look at yourself.’
‘What self?’
‘So who’s that talking now? Take a look at him.’
‘At myself? Oh…Right…Whoah…’
‘You see. And you said there was nothing in the world to be afraid of.’
‘Yeah…Right…Oh, fuck me! Listen, Volodin, this is real scary. Real scary stuff. Volodin, d’you hear me? Where’s the light? Volodin? I’m scared!’
‘And you said there was nothing in the world to be afraid of,’ said Volodin, raising his head and gazing wide-eyed into empty space, as though he’d seen something there.
‘Right then,’ he said in a changed voice, nudging Shurik and Kolyan, ‘let’s move it! Quick!’
‘Volodin, I can hardly hear you!’ Shurik yelled, swaying from side to side. ‘Volodin, I’m scared! Hey, Kolyan! Answer me, Kolyan!’
‘Me. Me. Me.’
‘Hey, Kolyan, can you see me? Just don’t go lookin’ at yourself, or it’ll turn dark. Can you see me, Kolyan?’
‘Me? Me?’
‘Move it, into the forest, quick!’ Volodin repeated, and he leapt to his feet.
‘What forest? There isn’t really any forest!’
‘You just run, and the forest’ll appear. Go on, run! You leg it too, Kolyan. Rendezvous at the camp-fire.’
‘Me?! Me?! Me?!!’
‘Fucking hell! I said let’s move it into the forest! Run for it!’
Even if we were to allow that the camp-fire that had been blazing in the clearing a few hours earlier really was a small universe unto itself, that universe had now ceased to exist, and all the sufferings of its inhabitants had been extinguished with it. Void and darkness were upon the face of the clearing, and there was nothing but a light smoke hanging in the air above the dead embers.
The radio-telephone in the car began to ring, and suddenly some small, startled life form began rustling in the bushes. The ringing went on for a long time, and after more than a minute its persistence was rewarded. There was a crunching of twigs in the bushes, followed by rapid footsteps. A blurred shadow flitted across the clearing towards the Jeep and a voice spoke:
‘Hello! Ultima Thule Limited? Of course I recognize you, of course. Yes! Yes! No! Tell Seryozha the Mongoloid not to get up my nose. No transfers. Cash ex-VAT and we tear up the contract. Tomorrow at ten in the office…no, not at ten, at twelve. Right.’
It was Volodin. He put down the receiver, opened up the Jeep’s boot, rummaged around until he found a spray-can, the contents of which he emptied on to the remains of the fire. Nothing happened – evidently even the embers had died completely. Then Volodin struck a match and dropped it on the ground, and a bright ball of yellow-red flame rose up into the air.
He spent several minutes collecting branches and twigs in the clearing and throwing them into the flames. When Shurik and Kolyan came wandering out of the forest towards the light, the camp-fire was already blazing away.
They appeared one at a time. Kolyan appeared first; before he emerged into the clearing, for some reason he sat for a long time in the bushes at its edge, holding his hand over his eyes as he gazed into the flames. Then he finally made up his mind, went up to the fire and sat down in his old place. Shurik arrived about ten minutes later; holding his ‘TT’ with the long silencer in his hand, he slunk out into the clearing, looked Kolyan and Volodin over and tucked the pistol away under his cashmere pea-jacket.
‘Fucked if I ever puts any of that stuff in my mouth again,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘Not for any money. I emptied two clips, and I don’t have a blind idea who I was shooting at.’
‘Didn’t you like it?’ asked Volodin.
‘It was kinda okay at first,’ Shurik replied, ‘but then afterwards…Listen, what were we talking about just before the explosion?’
&
nbsp; ‘Before what explosion?’ Volodin asked in amazement.
‘That, that…Or what could you call it…’
Shurik looked up at Volodin, as if hoping that he would prompt him with the words he needed, but Volodin said nothing.
‘Okay then,’ said Shurik, ‘at the very beginning we was talking about the eternal high, I remember that. And then the spiel kinda tipped off the rails, flip-flop, and then there was this flash of fire in my eyes…And you was yelling yourself, telling us to leg it into the forest. As soon as I came round I thought the wheels must have exploded. Thought those jerks from Slav-East must have put a bomb in it. And then I thought that didn’t make sense – there was flames all right, but there wasn’t no smell of petrol. So that means it’s all in the mind.’
‘Yes,’ said Volodin, ‘that’s right. All in the mind.’
‘So was that your eternal high, then?’ asked Shurik.
‘You could call it that,’ Volodin replied.
‘What did you do to make us able to see it?’ asked Shurik.
‘I didn’t do it,’ replied Volodin, ‘it was Kolyan. He was the one who took us in there.’
Shurik looked at Kolyan. Kolyan shrugged in puzzlement.
‘Yes,’ went on Volodin, gathering up the things lying by the fire and throwing them in through the Jeep’s open door, ‘you see the way things turn out. Take a good look at your mate, Shurik. He might never have seemed too quick on the uptake, but he was the one who pulled it off. The old spiel about blessed are the poor in spirit is sure right.’
‘Are we gonna leave, or what?’ Shurik asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Volodin. ‘It’s time to go. We’ve got a shoot with Slav-East at twelve. And by the time we get there, what with one thing and another…’
‘I can’t really remember anything straight,’ Shurik summed up the conversation. ‘But I feel really odd. For the first time in my life I want to do something good. Even help someone, maybe, save them from suffering. Take everyone, the whole fucking lot of them, and save them all…’
He turned his face up to the starry sky for a second, and it took on a dreamy and exalted expression. He sighed quietly and then, obviously taking a grip on himself, he took a step towards the camp-fire, turned his back to his two companions, fiddled with something in the region of his belt, and the tongues of flame were extinguished instantly under the heavy weight of the frothing stream.
A few minutes later they were travelling along a rough country road, more like a deep trench dug through the forest. Kolyan was snoring on the back seat. Sitting behind the wheel, Volodin was gazing hard into the darkness where the headlights sliced into it, while Shurik pondered on something and bit nervously at his lower lip.
‘Listen,’ he said at last. ‘There’s something else I don’t get. You said that once the eternal high hits you it never ends.’
‘It doesn’t ever end,’ Volodin replied, frowning as he turned the steering wheel sharply, ‘not if you get in the normal way, through the front door. But you could say we climbed in through the back window. That’s why the alarm went off.’
‘Some heavy alarm,’ said Shurik, ‘real heavy stuff.’
‘That’s nothing,’ said Volodin. ‘They could easily have put us away. There are cases like that. Take that Nietzsche Kolyan was jawing about, that’s exactly what happened to him.’
‘But if they collar you there, where do they put you?’ Shurik asked with a strange note of respect in his voice.
‘On the physical plane – in the madhouse. But where they put you on the subtle plane, I don’t know. That’s a mystery.’
‘Listen,’ asked Shurik, ‘can you get there as simple as that? Like, whenever you want?’
‘Nah,’ said Volodin. ‘I…How can I explain it? I can’t squeeze through the gap. I’ve picked up a lot of spiritual riches in my life. And getting rid of them afterwards is harder than cleaning the shit out of the grooves on the sole of your shoe. So I usually send one of the poor in spirit on ahead so he can squeeze through the eye of the needle and open the door from the inside. Like this time. But I didn’t think that if two poor in heart got in together they would create such a rumpus.’
‘What rumpus?’
Volodin was busy negotiating a complicated section of the road and didn’t answer. The Jeep shuddered once, then again. For several seconds its engine roared strenuously as it clambered up a steep hillock, then it turned and drove on along an asphalt surface, quickly picking up speed. An old Zhiguli came hurtling towards them, followed by a column of several military trucks. Volodin switched on the radio, and a minute later the four people sitting in the Jeep were enveloped in the old, familiar world whose every detail was clear and familiar.
‘So what rumpus was that you was talking about?’ Shurik asked again.
‘Okay,’ said Volodin, ‘we’ll run through all that later. You’ll have some homework to do. But for now let’s think about what we’ve got to show Slav-East.’
‘You think about it,’ said Shurik. ‘We’re only the cover round here. You’re the one pushes the wheels round.’
He was silent for a few seconds.
‘All the same, I just can’t get my head round it,’ he said. ‘Just who is that fourth guy?’
9
‘Indeed, who could this fourth person have been? Who can tell? Could it perhaps have been the devil ascended from the realms of eternal darkness in order to draw a few more fallen souls down after him. Or perhaps it was God who prefers, following certain events, to make His appearance here on earth incognito, most often associating exclusively with tax-collectors and sinners. Or perhaps – and surely most likely – it was someone quite different, someone far more real than any of the men sitting by the fire, because while there is not and cannot be any guarantee that Volodin, Kolyan and Shurik, and all these cocks, gods, devils, neo-Platonists and Twentieth Congresses ever actually existed, you, who have just been sitting by the fire yourself, you really do exist, and surely this is the very first thing that exists and has ever existed?’
Chapaev put the manuscript down on the top of his bureau and looked out for a while through the semicircular window of his study.
‘It seems to me, Petka, that the writer occupies too large a place in your personality,’ he said eventually. ‘This apostrophe to a reader who does not really exist is a rather cheap trick. Even if we assume that someone other than myself might possibly wade through this incomprehensible narrative, then I can assure you that he won’t give a single moment’s thought to the self-evident fact of his own existence. He is more likely to imagine you writing these lines. And I am afraid…’
‘But I am not afraid of anything,’ I interrupted nervously, lighting up a papyrosa. ‘I simply do not give a damn, nor have I for ages. I simply wrote down my latest nightmare as best I could. And that paragraph appeared…How shall I put it…By force of inertia. After that conversation I had with the baron.’
‘Yes, by the way, what did the baron tell you?’ Chapaev asked. ‘Judging from the fact that you came back wearing a yellow hat, the two of you must have had quite an emotional exchange.’
‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ I said. ‘I could sum it up by saying that he advised me to discharge myself from the hospital. He likened this world of constant alarms and passions, these thoughts about nothing and all this running nowhere, to a home for the mentally ill. And then – assuming I understood him correctly – he explained that in reality this home for the mentally ill does not exist, and neither does he, and neither do you, my dear Chapaev. There is nothing but me.’
Chapaev chuckled.
‘So that’s what you took him to mean. That is interesting. We shall come back to that, I promise you…But as for his advice to discharge yourself from the madhouse, that seems to me a suggestion which it is quite impossible to improve on. I really don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. Yes, indeed, instead of being terrified by each new nightmare, these nightly creations of your inflamed consciousness…’
‘I beg your pardon, I do not think I quite understand,’ I said. ‘Is it my inflamed consciousness that creates the nightmare, or is my consciousness itself a creation of the nightmare?’
‘They are the same thing,’ said Chapaev with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘All these constructs are only required so that you can rid yourself of them for ever. Wherever you might be, live according to the laws of the world you find yourself in, and use those very laws to liberate yourself from them. Discharge yourself from the hospital, Petka.’
‘I believe that I understand the metaphor,’ I said. ‘But what will happen afterwards? Shall I see you again?’
Chapaev smiled and crossed his arms.
‘I promise that you will,’ he said.
There was a sudden crash, and fragments of the upper window-pane scattered across the floor. The stone that had crashed through it struck against the wall and fell to the floor beside the bureau. Chapaev went over to the window and glanced cautiously out into the yard.
‘The weavers?’ I asked.
Chapaev nodded.
‘They are completely wild from drink now,’ he said.
‘Why do you not have a word with Furmanov?’ I asked.
‘I have no reason to believe he is capable of controlling them,’ Chapaev replied. ‘The only reason he remains their commander is because he always gives them exactly the orders that they wish to hear. He only has to make one single serious mistake, and they will find themselves another leader soon enough.’
‘I must confess that I am seriously alarmed on their account,’ I said. ‘The situation appears to me to be completely out of control. Please do not think that I am beginning to panic, but at some fine moment we could easily all find ourselves…Remember what has been going on for the last few days.’
‘It will all be resolved this evening,’ Chapaev said, fixing me with his gaze. ‘By the way, since you declare yourself to be concerned at this problem, which really is genuinely aggravating, why not make your own contribution? Help us to amuse the bored public and create the impression that we have also been drawn into their Bacchanalian revels. They must continue to believe that everyone here is of one mind.’
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