by Yuri Olesha
“But the student, with the instinct of a lover, understood all. He knew that Lilya was sobbing in the golden depths of her room, that she was dying to go to the balcony and see, without being seen, the student, whose white, high-collared jacket absorbed, following the laws of physics, the greatest number of rays and shone with a blinding Alpine whiteness; but she couldn’t go out because her aunt was all-powerful …
“‘Give me your bicycle, and I’ll avenge you,’ I told the student. ‘I know Lilya didn’t want to go anywhere. There’s been a tremendous ruckus and they’re sending her packing. Give me your bicycle.’
“‘How are you going to avenge me?’ the student asked, scared of me. And a few days later, with an innocent look, I brought Lilya’s aunt some wart ointment, saying it was from my mama. By her lower lip, in the cleft, the aunt had a giant wart. This aging lady kissed me, and not only that but her kisses made me feel exactly as if I’d been shot point-blank with a new slingshot … My friends, the student was avenged. Out of the aunt’s wart grew a flower, a modest bluebell. It trembled delicately whenever the aunt exhaled. She was disgraced. With arms raised to the heavens, the aunt rushed around the yard, sending everyone into a panic …
“My joy was twofold. First of all, my experiment at growing flowers from warts had succeeded brilliantly, and secondly, the student had given me his bicycle. And in that day, my friends, a bicycle was a rarity. At that time, they were still drawing cartoons of bicyclists.”
“But what happened to the aunt?”
“Oh, my friend! She lived with the flower until the autumn. She waited in hopes of windy days, and when the day finally came, she set out by the back roads, skirting the livelier parts of town, for somewhere green … She was wracked by moral agonies. She hid her face in her scarf, the flower lovingly tickled her lips, and this tickling sounded like the whisper of her misspent youth, like the specter of a lone, nearly trampled kiss … She stopped on a hilltop and lowered her scarf.
“‘Take it away, then, take it to the four corners of the earth! Blow, then, blow off its accursed petals,’ she prayed.
“The wind died down, as if out of spite. But then a mad bee flew up from a nearby dacha, aimed for the flower, and began making buzzing figure eights around the poor woman. The aunt took flight, and at home, ordering the servant not to let anyone in, sat in front of the mirror, looking at her mythic, flower-adorned face, which swelled up before her very eyes from the sting so that it looked like some tropical root. Horrors! But simply to cut the flower off—that would be too risky. It was a wart after all! What if the blood suddenly were infected!
“Vanya Babichev was a jack of all trades. He composed verse and musical skits, drew excellently, knew how to do so many things—he even made up a dance intended to take advantage of his own physical characteristics: his plumpness and indolence. He was a clod (like many remarkable men in their adolescence). The dance was called the Jug. He sold kites, whistles, and Chinese lanterns; little boys envied his adroitness and fame. In the yard he was nicknamed the ‘Mechanic.’
“Later in Petersburg, Ivan Babichev graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in the Mechanics Department, actually, the very same year his brother Roman was executed. Ivan worked as an engineer in Nikolayevo, near Odessa, at the Naval Factory, right up until the beginning of the European war.
“And there you have it …”
2
BUT WAS he ever really an engineer?
The year the Two Bits was being built, Ivan was plying a trade that enjoyed little respect and was, for an engineer, simply disgraceful.
Imagine! He drew portraits at beer stands for people who asked for them, composed impromptu speeches on assigned topics, read palms, and demonstrated the power of his memory by repeating fifty random words read to him in a row.
Sometimes he would pull a deck of cards out of his shirt, which made him look instantly like a cardsharp, and do magic tricks.
People would buy him beer. He would take a seat and then the main event would begin: Ivan Babichev would prophesy.
What did he talk about?
“We are a breed of men that has reached its upper limit,” he would say, banging his mug on the marble like a hoof. “Strong personalities, men who have decided to live their own way, egoists, obstinate men, I am turning to you as being more intelligent—my avant-garde! Listen those of you standing down front! An era is drawing to a close. The wave is breaking on the rocks, the wave is frothing, the foam is shimmering. What do you want? What? To vanish, to be reduced to nothing, droplets, a fine watery froth? No, my friends, you should not perish like that! No! Come to me, and I shall teach you.”
His listeners paid him a certain respect but little attention, however they did support him with cries of “That’s right!” and smatterings of applause. He would vanish without notice, pronouncing each time in farewell the same qua-train, which went like this:
No charlatan from Germany—
Deceit is not my game.
I’m a modern-day magician
With a Soviet claim to fame!
He also said the following:
“The gates are closing. Do you hear the gates creaking? Don’t push. Don’t try to penetrate beyond the threshold! Stop! Stopping is pride. Be proud. I am your leader, I am the king of the lowlifes. Anyone who sings and cries and smears his nose on the table when the beer is all drunk and they’re not serving any more has a place here, by my side. Come, you who are heavy with grief, borne by song. You who kill out of jealousy, you who tie a noose for yourself—I’m calling on both of you, children of a lost era, come, you lowlifes and dreamers, you patresfamilias who dote on your daughters, honest philistines, loyal to tradition, obedient to the standards of honor, duty, and love, who fear blood and chaos, my dear ones—soldiers and generals—let us launch a campaign. Where? I shall lead you.”
He devoured crabs. Crab carnage spilled from his hands. He was messy. His shirt, which looked like a tavern napkin, was always open at the chest. Not only that, but occasionally he would show up with starched cuffs, too. But dirty ones. If messiness can be combined with a tendency toward dandyism, then this would have suited him perfectly. For instance: the bowler. For instance: the flower in his buttonhole (which stayed there until it nearly formed fruit). And another for instance: the fraying trouser hems and the hanging threads of several long-gone jacket buttons.
“I’m a crab devourer. Look: I don’t eat them, I destroy them, like a priest. See? Marvelous crabs. Tangled up in seaweed. Ah, not seaweed? Plain greens, you say? Does it matter? Let’s call it seaweed. Then we can compare the crab to a ship raised from the bottom of the sea. Marvelous crabs. Kamsk crabs.”
He licked his fist, looked up his cuff, and pulled out a crab shell.
Had he ever really been an engineer? Wasn’t he lying? The picture of an engineer’s soul, an affinity for machines, metal, and blueprints—it just didn’t mesh with him! You would sooner take him for an actor or a defrocked priest. He was well aware that his listeners didn’t believe him. He himself spoke with a certain twinkle in the corner of his eye.
First at one saloon, then another, the tubby prophet would appear. Once he went so far as to allow himself to clamber onto a table … Clumsy and in no way prepared for high jinks like that, he climbed over heads, clutching at palm leaves—breaking bottles, felling palms. He steadied himself on the table, and waving two empty mugs like dumbbells, began to shout, “Here I am standing on the heights, surveying my gathering army! Come to me! Come to me! Great is my host! Small-time actors dreaming of glory! Unlucky lovers! Old maids! Bookkeepers! Ambitious men! Fools! Knights! Cowards! Come to me! Your king has come, Ivan Babichev! The time is not yet come; soon, soon we shall advance … Gather around, my host!”
He flung the mug aside and grabbing a concertina out of someone’s hands, spread it across his belly. The moan he extracted raised a storm: paper napkins flew up toward the ceiling.
Men in aprons and oilskin cuffs ran out from behind the
counter.
“Beer! Beer! Give us more beer! Give us a keg of beer! We have to drink to great events!”
But they didn’t serve any more beer, and the crowd was pushed out into the dark, and they drove out the prophet Ivan—the smallest of them all, and heavy, which made it hard for them to escort him out. Stubbornness and rage suddenly gave him the dead weight of a steel barrel full of oil.
They pulled his bowler down shamefully around his ears.
He started down the street, staggering in various directions, as if he were being passed from hand to hand, and sang—or was he wailing?—piteously, embarrassing passersby.
“Ophelia!” he sang. “Ophelia!” Just that one word; it raced overhead, it seemed to fly above the streets in a quickly looping, shining figure eight.
That same night he visited his famous brother. The two sat at the table. One facing the other. In the middle of the table was the lamp under the green lampshade. His brother Andrei was sitting there and so was Volodya. Volodya was asleep, his head resting on his book. Ivan, drunk, headed for the sofa. For a long time he kept trying to pull the sofa under him, the way people pull up a chair.
“You’re drunk, Vanya,” said his brother.
“I hate you,” replied Ivan. “You’re an idol.”
“Aren’t you ashamed, Vanya? Lie down, go to sleep. I’ll get you a pillow. Take off the bowler.”
“You don’t believe one word I say. You’re a dolt, Andrei. Don’t interrupt me. Otherwise I’ll bust the lampshade over Volodya’s head. Quiet. Why don’t you believe in Ophelia’s existence? Why don’t you believe I invented a marvelous machine?”
“You didn’t invent anything, Vanya. This is an obsession with you. You’re making a bad joke. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, huh? After all, you’re trying to take me for a fool. So what kind of a machine is this? Can there really be a machine like that? And why ‘Ophelia’? And why do you wear a bowler? Are you an antiques dealer, a diplomatic envoy?”
Ivan was silent. Then, as if sobering up all at once, he rose, and clenching his fists, he walked toward his brother.
“You don’t believe me? You don’t? Andrei, stand up when the leader of an army of millions is talking to you. You have the nerve not to believe me? You say there’s no such machine? Andrei, I promise you: that machine will be your downfall.”
“Don’t make a row,” his brother replied. “You’ll wake up Volodya.”
“I spit on your Volodya. I know, I know your plans. You want to give Volodya my daughter. You want to rear a new breed. My daughter is not an incubator. You aren’t going to get her. I won’t give her to Volodya. I’ll strangle her with my own hands.”
He paused and with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, thrust his hands into his pockets, and sort of lifting his belly, which was poking out, with his hands, said in a tone dripping with malice, “You’re mistaken, brother. You’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. Oh ho, sweetie. You think you love Volodya because Volodya is a new man? Pish-tush, Andryusha. Pish-tush … That’s not it, Andryusha, that’s not it … Quite the contrary.”
“What then?” asked Andrei ominously.
“You’re just getting old, Andryusha. You just need a son. These are just fatherly feelings. The family—it’s eternal, Andrei. And the idea of the new world being symbolized by the image of an unremarkable youth known only on the soccer field—it’s nonsense …”
Volodya raised his head.
“Greetings Edison of the new day!” exclaimed Ivan. “Hurrah!” And he bowed extravagantly.
Volodya looked at him in silence. Ivan guffawed.
“What is it, Edison? Don’t you believe there’s an Ophelia either?”
“You, Ivan Petrovich, should be put in Kanatchikov,” said Volodya, yawning.
Andrei gave a brief snort.
Then the prophet flung his bowler on the floor.
“Boors!” he exclaimed. And after a pause: “Andrei! You’re allowing this? Why are you allowing your heir to insult your brother?”
Ivan did not see his brother’s eyes; Ivan saw only a flash of glass.
“Ivan,” said Andrei, “I beg of you never to come see me again. You’re not insane. You’re a beast.”
3
DISCUSSIONS ensued about the new prophet.
From the saloons, a rumor ricocheted into apartments and crawled down the dark passages into the communal kitchens—in the hour of morning washing up, in the hour of primus stove lighting, people watching the milk trying to boil over and others splashing under the tap blathered gossip.
The rumor spread to institutions, rest homes, and markets.
A story was composed about a citizen, a stranger (who wore a bowler, according to the details, a shabby, suspicious man, none other than Ivan Babichev himself), who went to a wedding for a bill collector, on Yakimanka, and presenting himself at the very height of the feast, demanded everyone’s attention for his speech—an address to the newlyweds. He said, “You don’t have to love each other. You don’t have to unite. Groom, leave your bride. What fruit will your love bear? You’ll bring your own enemy into the world. He’ll devour you.”
The groom was ready to start a fight. The bride crumpled to the ground. The guests departed, greatly offended, whereupon it seems to have been discovered that the port wine in all the bottles on the feast table had turned to water.
Another amazing story was dreamed up.
It seems an automobile was driving through a very noisy place (some said Neglinny near Kuznetsky Bridge, others Tverskaya near the Monastery of the Passion), and in it sat a respectable citizen, stout, red-cheeked, holding a briefcase on his knees.
And apparently his brother Ivan, that same famous little man, ran out from the crowd into the street. Envying his riding brother, he stood in the car’s way, arms spread like a scarecrow, or the way people do when they stop a runaway horse by spooking it. The driver managed to slow down in time. He honked, continuing to inch forward, but the scarecrow wouldn’t get out of the road.
“Stop!” the little man shouted at the top of his voice. “Stop, commissar! Stop, kidnapper of other people’s children!”
The driver had no choice but to brake. Traffic came to a halt. Several vehicles nearly reared up as they flew at the car in front, and a bus gave a roar and stopped, utterly distraught, ready to surrender, to pick up its elephant tires and tiptoe back … The man standing in the street with outstretched arms demanded silence.
And everything fell silent.
“Brother,” the little man intoned. “Why are you riding in an automobile while I go on foot? Open the door, move over, let me in. Going on foot doesn’t suit me either. You’re a leader, but I’m a leader, too.”
And indeed, at these words people ran up to him from different sides, several jumped out of the bus, others left the nearby beer stands, still others hurried over from the boulevard—and the man sitting in the automobile, the brother, having stood up, immense, even bigger because he was standing in an automobile, saw before him a living barricade.
His ominous look was such that he seemed about to take a step and walk across the vehicle, across the driver’s back, onto those at the barricade, like a crushing pillar—the full height of the street …
Ivan, meanwhile, had actually been lifted on people’s arms: he rose above the crowd of disciples, swayed, fell down, and snapped back up; his bowler slipped back on his head, exposing the large, clear brow of a weary man.
And his brother Andrei dragged him down from that height, grabbing a handful of his trousers at the belly. He flung him like that at a policeman.
“To the GPU!” he said.
Scarcely had the magic word been spoken than the crowd shook itself out of its stupor and emerged from its state of lethargy; matches sparked, plugs started spinning, doors slammed, and all the actions resumed that had begun before the lethargy.
Ivan was under arrest for ten days.
When he was returned to freedom, his friends and fellow drinker
s asked him whether it was true he’d been arrested on the street by his brother and under such amazing circumstances. He guffawed.
“That’s a lie. A legend. They just arrested me at a beer-stand. I think they’ve been watching me for a long time. But anyway, it’s good they’re already making up legends. The end of an era, a transitional period, needs its own legends and tales. I’m happy, you know, I’m going to be the hero of one of those tales. And there’s going to be another legend: about the machine that bore the name ‘Ophelia’ … The era will die with my name on people’s lips. That’s what I’m applying my efforts to.”
They let him go, threatening him with deportation.
What did they accuse him of at the GPU?
“Have you been calling yourself a king?” the investigator asked him.
“Yes … king of the lowlifes.”
“What does that mean?”
“You see, I’m opening the eyes of a large category of people …”
“What are you opening their eyes to?”
“They have to understand that they’re doomed.”
“You said ‘a large category of people.’ Who do you have in mind by that category?”
“Everyone you call decadents. The bearers of decadent moods. If you will allow me, I’ll elaborate.”
“I would appreciate that.”
“ … a number of human emotions seem subject to extinction …”
“For example? Emotions like …”
“ … pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love—in short, nearly all the emotions comprised by the soul of the man in the era now coming to a close. The era of socialism will create a new series of conditions for the human soul to replace the old emotions.”
“I see.”
“I see you understand me. A Communist bitten by the snake of jealousy is subject to persecution. So too is a compassionate Communist subject to persecution. The buttercup of pity, the lizard of ambition, the snake of jealousy—these flora and fauna must be driven out of the new man’s heart.