Doomed City

by Arkady Strugatsky

  In fact, of course, Andrei realized only too well that it wasn’t all as simple as that, but it was comforting to think that it had all really been a delirious delusion, that he really had tripped and smashed his head—that really made it all quite amusing, and it was certainly convenient. What do I do now? he thought hazily. So I’ve found the Building; I’ve been inside it and seen it for myself . . . But what next? Don’t go trying to stuff my head—my poor, aching head—with all that bombastic garbage about rumors and myths and all the rest of that stupid propaganda. That’s just for starters. So don’t forget . . . Actually, that was my mistake—I think I was the one stuffing everyone else’s heads. I have to release that guy right away . . . what’s his name . . . the flute man. I wonder if that Ella of his played chess in there too? Shit, but my head is hurting like hell . . .

  The handkerchief had gotten really warm now. Andrei got up with a grunt, hobbled across to the fountain, leaned over the edge, and held the damp rag in the ice-cold stream for a while. Someone was hammering on his lump with passionate fury—from the inside. How about that for a myth! A.k.a. a mirage . . . He squeezed out the handkerchief, pressed it against the painful spot again, and looked across the street. The fat policeman was still sleeping. Fat scumbag, Andrei thought rancorously. Some sentry you are. Why did I bother to bring you? Just so you could catch up on your shut-eye, was it? I could have been bumped off a hundred times here. And then, of course, after that jerk had caught up on his sleep, he would have shown up at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the morning and reported as a matter of routine that the investigator went into the Red Building last night and never came back out again. Andrei spent some time imagining how glorious it would feel right now to fill a bucket with icy water, sneak up to the fat bastard, and pour the entire bucketful down the back of his neck. Wouldn’t that just make him freak! That was how the boys used to amuse themselves at the training camp: if someone dozed off, they tied a shoe to his private parts with the laces, then put that huge, filthy shit-crusher on his face. Still half asleep, the guy would go berserk and savagely launch the shoe into space with all his might. It was very funny.

  Andrei went back to the bench and found that he had acquired a companion. A scraggy little man dressed completely in black—even his shirt was black—was sitting there with one leg crossed over the other, holding an old-fashioned bowler hat on his knees. Probably the caretaker from the synagogue. Andrei gingerly sat down beside him, cautiously probing the boundaries of the lump through the damp handkerchief.

  “Well, all right,” the little man said in a clear, old voice. “But what comes next?”

  “Nothing special,” said Andrei. “We’ll catch all of them. I won’t just leave things like this.”

  “And then?” the old man persisted.

  “I don’t know,” Andrei said after a moment’s thought. “Maybe some other abomination will turn up. The Experiment is the Experiment. It’s not for long.”

  “It’s for ever and ever,” the old man remarked. “According to every religion—it’s forever.”

  “Religion’s got nothing to do with this,” Andrei objected.

  “You still think that, even now?” the old man asked in surprise.

  “Of course. That’s what I’ve always thought.”

  “All right, let’s not talk about that for now. The Experiment is the Experiment, a rope is just a piece of string—plenty of people here console themselves like that, almost everybody. Which, by the way, is something that not a single religion foresaw. But I’m talking about something else. Why have we been left with freedom of will, even here? You’d think that in the kingdom of absolute evil, in a kingdom with ABANDON HOPE . . . written on its gates . . .”

  Andrei waited for a continuation, but none came, and he said, “You have a rather strange perspective on all this. This isn’t a kingdom of absolute evil. It’s more like chaos, and we’re here to put it in order. And how can we put it in order if we don’t possess free will?”

  “An interesting idea,” the old man said thoughtfully. “That had never occurred to me. So you believe that we’ve been given another chance. Something like a penal battalion—to wash away the blood of our transgressions at the front line of the eternal battle between good and evil.”

  “What’s the battle with evil got to do with anything?” asked Andrei, starting to get annoyed. “Evil is something deliberate and purposeful—”

  “You’re a Manichean!” the old man interrupted.

  “I’m a Komsomol member!” Andrei protested, getting even more annoyed and feeling a terrific upsurge of belief and certainty. “Evil is always a class phenomenon. There’s no such thing as evil in general. But everything’s all muddled up here, because this is the Experiment. We have been given chaos. And if we can’t cope with it, we’ll go back to what we had there—to class stratification and all the rest of the garbage. Either we master chaos and transform it into the new, beautiful forms of human relations that are called communism . . .”

  The old man listened for a while in bemused silence. “Well, well,” he said eventually with immense surprise. “Who could ever have thought it, who could ever have expected it . . . Communist propaganda—here! It’s not even a schism, it’s . . .” He paused for a moment. “But then, the ideas of communism are akin to the ideas of early Christianity, aren’t they?”

  “That’s a lie!” Andrei protested angrily. “An invention of the priests. Early Christianity was an ideology of resignation, the ideology of slaves. But we are rebels! We won’t leave a single stone unturned here, and then we’ll go back there, we’ll go home and rebuild everything there the same way as we’ve rebuilt it here!”

  “You’re Lucifer,” the old man said with reverential horror. “The proud spirit! Have you really not resigned yourself to your lot?”

  Andrei carefully turned the handkerchief cold side down and looked at the little old man suspiciously. “Lucifer? I see. And who exactly would you be, then?”

  “I’m a louse,” the old man replied tersely.

  “Hmm . . .” That was kind of hard to argue with.

  “I’m an insignificant insect, no one,” the old man explained. “I was no one there, and I’m no one here too.” He paused for a moment. “You have inspired hope in me,” he declared unexpectedly. “Yes, yes, yes. You can’t even imagine . . . how strange, how strange . . . What a joy it was to listen to you! Truly, if free will has been left to us, then why does there have to be resignation and patient suffering? Yes, I regard this meeting as the most significant episode in all the time that I have been here . . .”

  Andrei examined him with alert hostility. He was mocking him, the old coot . . . No, it didn’t look like it . . . The synagogue caretaker? The synagogue! “Pardon me for asking,” he inquired ingratiatingly, “but have you been here for long? I mean sitting here on this bench?”

  “No, not very long. At first I was sitting on a stool over there in that entranceway—there’s a stool in there . . . But after the Building went away, I moved to the bench.”

  “Aha,” said Andrei. “So you saw the Building, then?”

  “Of course I did!” the old man replied with dignity. “I sat there, listening to the music and crying.”

  “Crying,” Andrei repeated, agonizingly racking his brains to figure all this out. “Tell me, are you a Jew?”

  The old man started. “Good Lord, no! What kind of question is that? I’m a Catholic, a faithful and—alas!—unworthy son of the Roman Catholic Church . . . I have nothing against Judaism, of course, but . . . But why did you ask about that?”

  “No special reason,” Andrei said evasively. “So you don’t have anything to do with the synagogue, then?”

  “Not really,” said the old man. “Apart from the fact that I often sit here in this little square and the caretaker comes here sometimes . . .” He giggled in embarrassment. “He and I engage in religious disputes.”

  “But what about the Building?” Andrei asked, squeezing h
is eyes shut to fight the pain in his skull.

  “The Building? Well, when the Building comes, obviously we can’t sit here. In that case we have to wait until it leaves.”

  “So this isn’t the first time you’ve seen it, then?”

  “Of course not. It comes almost every night . . . Of course, today it stayed longer than usual.”

  “Hang on,” said Andrei. “And do you know what Building that is?”

  “It’s hard not to recognize it,” the old man said in a quiet voice. “Before, in the other life, I saw images and descriptions of it quite often. It’s described in detail in the confessions of Saint Anthony—that’s not a canonical text, now . . . for us Catholics . . . Anyway, I’ve read it: ‘And there appeared unto me a house, living and moving, and it did make obscene movements, and within I saw through the windows people who walked through its rooms, slept, and took food . . .’ I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the quotation, but it’s very close to the text . . . And also, obviously, Hieronymus Bosch . . . I would call him Saint Hieronymus Bosch—I owe him a great deal; he prepared me for this . . .” The old man made a broad, sweeping gesture with his hand. “His remarkable paintings . . . The Lord must surely have allowed him to visit here. Like Dante . . . By the way, there is a manuscript that is attributed to Dante, in which this Building is also mentioned. How does it go now . . .” The old man closed his eyes and raised one hand with widespread fingers to his forehead. “Er, er . . . ‘And my companion, reaching out his hand, dry and bony . . .’ Mmm . . . No . . . ‘The tangle of bloody, naked bodies in twilit chambers . . .’ Mmm . . .”

  “Hold on,” said Andrei, licking his dry lips. “What sort of nonsense is it you’re spouting? What have Saint Anthony and Dante got to do with anything? Just what are you driving at?”

  The old man was surprised. “I’m not driving at anything,” he said. “You asked me about the Building, didn’t you, and I . . . Of course, I must thank God that in His eternal wisdom and infinite benevolence He enlightened me and allowed me to prepare myself. I shall learn a very, very great deal here, and my heart breaks when I think of the others who have arrived here and don’t understand, who aren’t capable of understanding where they have come to. A harrowing failure to grasp the reality of things and the harrowing memory of one’s sins in the bargain. Perhaps that is also the great wisdom of the Creator, the eternal awareness of one’s sins without the awareness of retribution for them . . . Take you, for instance, young man: Why has He cast you down into this abyss?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andrei muttered sullenly, and thought to himself, Religious fanatics are just about all that was missing here.

  “No need to be shy about it,” the old man said encouragingly. “There’s no point in hiding anything here, for the Judgement has already been made . . . I, for instance, sinned against my own people: I was a traitor, an informer—I saw how the people whom I betrayed to the servants of Satan were tortured and killed. I was hanged in 1944.” The old man paused. “And when did you die?”

  “I didn’t die,” Andrei said, his blood running cold.

  The old man nodded with a smile. “Yes, that’s what many people think,” he said. “But they’re mistaken. History records cases in which people have been taken up to heaven while alive, but no one has ever heard of them being exiled alive—as a punishment!—to hell.”

  Andrei listened, staring at him in a daze.

  “You’ve simply forgotten,” the old man went on. “There was a war, bombs were falling in the streets, you were running to a bomb shelter and suddenly—a blast, pain, and everything disappeared. And afterward, a vision of an angel, speaking benignly in parables—and here you are.” He nodded sagely again, thrusting out his lower lip. “Yes, yes, undoubtedly that is where the impression of free will comes from. Now I understand: it’s inertia. Merely inertia, young man. You spoke with such conviction that you even shook me somewhat . . . the organization of chaos, a new world . . . No, no, it’s merely inertia. It should pass off in time. Don’t forget, hell is eternal, there is no way back, and you’re still only in the first circle . . .”

  “Are you serious?” Andrei asked in a slightly squeaky voice.

  “You know all this yourself,” the old man said gently. “You know it all perfectly well! It’s just that you’re an atheist, a young man, and you don’t want to admit to yourself that all your life—short as it was—you were wrong. Your obtuse and ignorant teachers taught you that ahead of you there was nothing, an empty void, putrefaction, that you could expect neither gratitude nor retribution for what you had done. And you accepted these squalid ideas, because you were so very young, you possessed excellent bodily health, and death was merely a distant abstraction for you. Having committed evil, you always hoped to escape punishment, because the ones who could punish you were men exactly the same as you. And if you happened by chance to do good, you demanded immediate reward from those who were exactly like you. You were ludicrous. Now you understand that, of course—I can see it in your face . . .” He suddenly laughed. “We had an engineer in our underground organization, a materialist; he and I often argued about life after death. My God, how he used to mock me! ‘Pop,’ he used to say, ‘you and I will finish off this pointless argument in heaven . . .’ And you know, I’m still searching for him here—I search, but I simply can’t find him. Perhaps there was some truth in his joke; perhaps he really did go to heaven—as a martyr. He certainly died an agonizing death . . . And I’m here.”

  “Nocturnal disputes about life and death?” a familiar voice suddenly croaked right in Andrei’s ear, and the bench quaked as Izya Katzman, in his customary disheveled and shock-headed condition, plumped himself down on the other side of Andrei. In his left hand he was clutching a light-colored document file and with his right he immediately started fiddling with his wart. As always, he was in state of ecstatic exaltation.

  Trying to sound as casual as possible, Andrei said, “This elderly gentleman here believes that we are all in hell.”

  “The elderly gentleman is absolutely right,” Izya immediately retorted, and started giggling. “At least, if it’s not hell, it’s something entirely indistinguishable from it in all its manifestations. However, you must admit, Pan Stupalski, that you have not yet discovered in my career while alive even a single transgression for which I deserved to be dispatched to this place! I didn’t even commit adultery, I was so stupid.”

  “Pan Katzman,” the old man declared, “I can easily accept that you yourself are entirely unaware of that fateful transgression of yours!”

  “Possibly, possibly,” Izya readily agreed. “From the look of you,” he said, addressing Andrei, “you have been in the Red Building. Well, how did you like it in there?”

  And at that moment Andrei finally recovered his wits. As if the murky, sticky membrane of his nightmare had suddenly burst and melted, the pain in his head had faded away, and now he could distinguish everything around him sharply and clearly, and Main Street stopped being murky and misty, and it turned out that the policeman wasn’t sleeping on the motorcycle at all but sauntering along the sidewalk with the red tip of his cigarette glowing, casting glances in the direction of the bench. My God, Andrei thought, almost in horror, what am I doing here? After all, I’m an investigator, time’s passing by, and here I am engaging in idle banter with this crackpot, and then Katzman’s here . . . Katzman? How did he get here? “How do you know where I’ve been?” he asked abruptly.

  “It’s not hard to guess,” said Izya, giggling. “You should take a look at yourself in the mirror . . .”

  “I’m asking you a serious question!” said Andrei, raising his voice.

  The old man suddenly got up. “Good night, pánové,” he said, transferring the bowler hat to his head with a smooth movement. “Pleasant dreams.”

  Andrei took no notice of him. He looked at Izya. But Izya, plucking at his wart and gently bobbing up and down on the spot, watched as the old man moved awa
y, grinned from ear to ear, and was already choking and grunting in anticipation. “Well?” said Andrei.

  “What a character!” Izya declared admiringly. “Ah, what a character! You’re a fool, Voronin, as always—you don’t have a clue about anything! Do you know who that is? That’s the famous Pan Stupalski, Stupalski the Judas! He betrayed 248 people to the Gestapo in Lodz, he was exposed twice, and both times he somehow managed to wriggle out of it and put someone else in his place. It was only after the liberation that they finally nailed him, and he was given a fair and speedy trial, but even then he ducked out of it. The esteemed Mentors deemed it useful to extract him from the noose and send him here. To complete the bouquet. He lives in a madhouse here, acts as if he’s crazy, but meanwhile he carries on with his favorite line of work . . . Do you think he just happened by chance to be here on the bench, right beside you? Do you know who he works for now?”

  “Shut up!” said Andrei, summoning up the willpower to smother the eager curiosity that consumed him every time Izya told his stories. “I’m not interested in all that. How did you come to be here? And how the hell did you know that I’d been inside the Building?”

  “I was inside it myself,” Izya said calmly.

  “I see,” said Andrei. “So what happened in there?”

  “Well, you know best what happened in there. How should I know what happened as you saw it?”

  “And what happened as you saw it?’

  “Now, that is absolutely none of your business,” said Izya, adjusting the voluminous document file on his knees.

  “Did you get the file in there?” asked Andrei, reaching out his hand.

  “No,” said Izya. “Not in there.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Listen,” said Izya. “What business is that of yours? What are you pestering me for?”

  Izya still didn’t understand what was going on. But then, Andrei himself didn’t fully understand what was going on, and his mind raced feverishly as he tried to decide what to do next.