“The homeland,” cried an agitated Perkhushkov, “oh, what could be dearer than the homeland in a world of Final Resolutions? Nothing! And indeed, how wise are the golden Final Resolutions with their piercing light, how timely and yet how unexpectedly they occur, with what profound heat they scorch our souls, even like unto a gleaming sword, double-edged, bilaterally sinuous, filled with untold radiance, indestructible, indivisible, invincible forever and ever more! And truly—how would we live without Resolutions, we, who are pitiful, white, naked, blind, and trembling, like the cold worms and legless water larvae? O, shall we be likened unto the transparent lice, who in dense ignorance and animal unbelief gnaw the green leaf; O, shall we be likened unto the simple insects, who throng unaware in a drop of well water? O, shall we be likened unto the undifferentiated amoebas thirsting and fearing the division of their very selves—and sinfully thirsting in vain, for nothing which divideth in itself will stand; O, how dark, empty, and fearful it would be for us without Resolutions, how timidly we crawl between the stony desert’s mountain outcrops, starting in fear at the least flutter or squeak, how pitifully we whine, stretching our hands, tentacles, metameric segments, chewers, pincers, and cilia into the utter darkness, which giveth forth only cold and a fetid roar: enlighten us! O, enlighten us! And how dimly the chill, extinguished, previous Final Resolutions glimmer, as if coated with fog and rust, for they have lost their currency and topical interest, like a maid loseth the color of youth, like a rose—its springtime pollen . . .
“And behold, the hour chimeth, and it cannot be foreseen, a voice thundereth—and who would dare envision it? The heavens open wide and the shrouds are rent, and the hundred-eyed Beast, whose number is twelve, sort of all in purple and scarlet, revealeth himself in a terrible thunder, rolling his legs:
“—and a papakha hat of costly lamb’s wool is his miter, and his clothes are of wool, the finest spun and the color of evening mists;
“—and his breast and his loins are of rubies and purest un-polluted gold, his shroud is double-breasted, and in number his snaps equal the sands of the seas;
“—at his head lies the star Saryn, a corpse lieth at his feet; girdled is he with inexpressible crenulations;
“—and, raising high a horn, with a voice like the sound of the waters he thrice exclaimeth: Behold, behold, behold the Final Resolutions!
“And with uncompared strength, and sound equally beyond compare, the Beast unfoldeth the list of Final Resolutions, and their light, my compatriots—their light was like unto the explosion of a thousand suns, and seeing it, all gloom, foulness, and filth ran, hiding from the face of the earth, letting forth a stream of helpless maledictions.
“So, describe this, my friend, my young poet,” Perkhushkov asked Lyonechka, “describe it as a citizen, as a soldier, one of the ranks. And may this book be as sweet as honey on our tongues, in our belly let it be ever as bitter as the root of the wormwood of Kara Kum, as the medicinal resin of the Pamir caves, as the salt of the lakes of Elton and Baskunchak, may its effect be ever purifying as the Carlsbad salts.”
Perkhushkov peeled off Svetlana, stood up, and straightened his shirt, vest, army jacket, overcoat, cloak, parka, shroud, and black cape with an azure lining—he straightened everything that he had on or imagined he wore.
“And as far as the homeland is concerned,” he said from the threshold, piercing a terrified Judy with his forty eyes, “I’ve explained it. Whosoever abideth in it, he will abide. As for those who can’t—we’ll find the right abode for them.” And, narrowing some of his eyes, he flashed his spurs and left.
“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, featherbeds, 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.
Then the hawthorn bush shook, and coughing, Perkhushkov spoke up unseen from the bush:
“Oh damn! Mea culpa. You people will be the death of me. We didn’t foresee possible currency operations.”
“What currency operations?” said Akhmed Khasianovich, looking around with his mad, magnificent goat eyes. Svetlana glanced at Akhmed Khasianovich, fell in love with him to the grave, and pressed herself to his breast.
“What kind, what kind,” came the shout from the bush, “forbidden ones, that’s what kind! Don’t you realize what awaits us? I sit on high, look far and wide, never close my eyes, I spy, I spy: our sister-region comrades pass through town and village, our sister-region comrades bear Tulumbass currency: its light is blinding, its quantity uncounted, in town and village they’re buying up milk and cabbage, galoshes and caramels, undermining the allowable, violating the permissible. Soon the Tulumbass comrades will set foot in the town of R., which is entrusted to my care: pillars will collapse and roofs will crack, walls will sway and the earth will yawn, the savings banks will go up in black smoke and a heavenly fire will devour the housing offices and government insurance departments if the tiniest unit of currency touches the right hand of even our lowliest compatriot. Terror, noose, and pit!” shouted the bush.
And, as if in answer to his speech, down below, at the foot of the hill, a horn rang out: it was Olga Khristoforovna announcing the assembly of all the units, which, however, weren’t there.
“There’s bad luck for you . . .” whispered Vasily Paramonovich. “Or maybe it’ll work out? It seems the central authorities informed us that their currency is shells on twine. Tiny little things, yellow, with spots. Shaped like a baby’s privates. There were instructions.”
“Maybe it will work out,” the bush said, calming down. “And anyway, Akhmed Khasianovich is responsible.”
“They’re coming!” shouted Akhmed Khasianovich. The Tulumbasses walked on and on in an endless stream, breaking bushes and crushing trees.
“About five thousand,” estimated Vasily Paramonovich, swearing as nastily as a soldier.
“Tartars through and through,” said Antonina Sergeevna sadly in a very old-fashioned way, to which the Tartar Akhmed Khasianovich replied, “I beg your pardon?”
“Why are they armed?” cried the keen-eyed Perkhushkov. “I’m going to have to annihilate a few people with entries in their dossiers.”
“That’s the way he always is,” said Antonina Sergeevna. “Tries to scare you, but he’s really a kind soul. He also loves fowl. At home he’s got baby chickens and ducklings and turkey chicks. He recognizes them all and knows them by name. Feeds them himself and eats them himself. And he always writes down which one he’s eaten: Rainbow or Buck Buck or White Tail, and he pastes a photo in his album. Just like children, honestly.”
The sun broke through the clouds and shone on the gun barrels of the approaching crowd.
“Hey, it’s our guys! Soldiers!” Vasily Paramonovich laughed joyfully. “They got here on time. Bread and salt retreat! Those are our guys. There, the tanks have appeared. Lord, what a wonderful sight!”
And truly, they were our guys. They moved harmoniously, beautifully, leaving behind them an even swath, like a highway. They moved on foot and on motorcycles, on jeeps, and tanks, and Volgas, black and milk-colored, and one Mercedes, camouflaged as a train trackman’s hut.
The hut turned its back to the forest, its face to us, and from the lacquered door Colonel Zmeev emerged, glowing with unbearable male beauty.
On seeing him, Svetlana even let out a cry.
“Heigh-ho!” Colonel Zmeev greeted our leadership in English. “To your health. How many magnificent multicolored women and stylish civilians. How marvelously the sun shines and the frosty wind refreshes. How symbolic are the generous gifts of our rich earth: bread, and likewise salt. But we’re no slouches: allow me to thank you for your attention and hospitality and offer you these modest gifts, made or requisitioned by our departmental craftsmen in their rare hours of leisure. Amangeldyev! Hand out the modest gifts.”
Amangeldyev, a soldier of medium height whose face expressed constant readiness either for fright or for immediate physical pleasure, offered the box with the modest gifts and spread out on the withered grass a fringed tablecloth which was somehow instantly and densely covered with bottles of cognac and cold fish snacks.
“To your arrival!” Vasily Paramonovich clinked glasses with the guests. “Thank God. You got here in time. We had already started to worry. The aviation up there—they didn’t disappoint us, they’ve been around since morning. The sixth ocean! You get my meaning!”
“The wild blue yonder,” agreed Akhmed Khasianovich, glancing jealously at the colonel, who was thrice entwined by Svetlana. “Heavenly eagles.”
“Steel birds zoom in where tanks fear to crawl,” said Vasily Paramonovich joyfully.
“It’s not quite like that,” smiled Colonel Zmeev. “With the help of contemporary technology we can crawl in where our grandfathers never dreamed. The song’s outdated.”
“Pickles! Help yourselves to pickles! Dig in!” bustled Antonina Sergeevna, treating the guests to their own goods.
“Oh, the eternally feminine,” said Zmeev, approving Antonina Sergeevna’s fussing, and Svetlana squeezed him even harder.
Lyonechka looked at Amangeldyev, who, as a representative of a national minority and moreover a simple subordinate, had instantly endeared himself to the poet.
After a snack, the colonel distributed the gifts. Lyonechka was presented a length of green Syrian brocade 240 by 70 centimeters, which he gave straightaway to Amangeldyev for puttees. (Like a shout in the mountains, this act provoked an entire avalanche of events: Amangeldyev’s grateful relatives sent Lyonechka’s family monthly parcels of dried apricots, whetting stones, fake medicinal resin, and dark blue raisins for two years; since by that time Lyonechka had already disappeared, his flabbergasted family, suffocating under the landslide of gifts and not understanding what it owed to the unknown givers, scrupulously tried to stop this bounty with no return address. Then three of Amangeldyev’s cousins descended, wanting to rent an apartment, sell melons, buy rugs, and enter law school to become prosecutors; greeted with insufficient affection, in their view, they burned down a cooperative garage, tore up a children’s sandbox, and bent in half the linden saplings recently planted by Pioneer scouts; not having fully appreciated the effectiveness of Aunt Zina’s old connections, however, they were captured in the Hunters’ Café in the middle of bartering a suitcase full of turquoise for yellow-striped certificate rubles with a certain Gokht, for whom the police had long been searching, but this is all beside the point.) Judy received dried fish, Svetlana a pen on a granite base, and I got a Warsaw Pact Armed Forces calendar of memorable dates.
White Walls Page 36