KUZMA (sings from outside the window): High above in the clear blue sky…
MIUD (also outside the window, continuing the song in a pitiful voice): Waves a scarlet banner.
SERENA (her failing body barely moving in the dance, sadly to ALYOSHA): Oh, I feel so sad in my stomach!
ALYOSHA: What is it? Is your soul taking leave of your body?
SERENA (bends over in convulsions and does something into a handkerchief): My soul’s already left! (The music has stopped altogether. The guests are seated along the sides of the rooms, convulsing in their chairs from gastric emotions. Immediately after the fact of the handkerchief, SERENA changes, turns joyful, and dances on alone. To her father) Papa, what I’d like now is a little fox-trot. (STERVETSEN sits down at the piano and begins to play a slow, pessimistic fox-trot. SERENA moves about and sings):
Oh, sailor who sails the oceans no more,
Oh, my far-far-traveled young lad,
Sail back for a last farewell—
Without you,
Even fox-trots are sad.
(Sadly, to ALYOSHA) Where do you keep your Bolshevik soul? Without it, Europe weeps in boredom…
ALYOSHA: The bourgeoisie must weep without respite. It’s good for them to do a little crying!
SERENA: Oh, Alyosha, Bolshevism is so sweet! Life here is so joyful and hard! Embrace me with your Bolshevik fearlessness!
ALYOSHA (pushing SERENA away): I’m not interested. You’re a member of the bourgeoisie.
OPORNYKH: Er…now, what’s the name…Ignat Nikanorovich, may I throw up, please—the second helping is still with me.
GODOVALOV (pleading): Ignat Nikanorovich, I just need to heave up that one extra mouthful—I took too large a serving.
FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Comrade Shchoev, please, let me go off duty now! I’ve already spent a whole evening being joyful.
SHCHOEV: Silence! School yourselves in self-control—you are opening a new epoch of radiant food. The whole world is developing, thanks to patience and torment. (Pensively) Patience! That’s the reason why time keeps moving somewhere.
YEVSEI (to the guests): That’s enough of your bellyaching!
KUZMA is crying outside the window. Some kind of liquid is trickling down his iron face.
MIUD (through the window): Alyosha, take us in, we’re bored and weary. Fascist Nature is blowing at me out here, and Kuzma is crying.
ALYOSHA (suddenly remembering them): Miud!
He drags first MIUD, then KUZMA in through the window. KUZMA rumbles. The guests all turn their faces to the wall; they are tormented by nausea. KUZMA eats the remnants of the office’s food supply. The clock strikes in the town belfry.
SERENA: Papa, where do they keep their superstructure?
STERVETSEN (to SHCHOEV): Mister Patron! We are most desirous, and you would gladden all Pan-Europe if you could let us have the fiery spirit from within your state superstructure.41
KUZMA goes into the toilet.
SERENA: Or even just sell us a Party line…Papa, that’ll be cheaper!
SHCHOEV (pensively): You want to procure for yourselves our spirit of enthusiasm?
YEVSEI (to SHCHOEV): Let them have it, Ignat Nikanorovich, even though there is no norm for such sales. What we need now is containers and packaging, not spirit.
SHCHOEV: Well then! We have any number of Party lines on enthusiasm, almost a surplus, as it turns out. (From the toilet comes the distinct, cast-iron sound of KUZMA belching. After KUZMA, the guests all do the same, simultaneously. SHCHOEV turns his attention to the guests.) Be off now and go to bed. Tomorrow’s a working day. (The guests disappear. SHCHOEV, YEVSEI, STERVETSEN, SERENA, MIUD, ALYOSHA, and the FIREMAN and the POLICEMAN remain. SHCHOEV then turns his attention back to STERVETSEN.) Well then, we can let you have some ideological lines, but only in exchange for foreign currency!
An explosion of collective nausea offstage.
YEVSEI: They stuffed themselves till they burst, the monsters. They’re yelping now…but they’ll get used to it!
POLICEMAN AND FIREMAN (smiling): They have no self-control.
Scene 2
The stage as before. MIUD is sleeping on a bench, hugging KUZMA. YEVSEI dozes in a chair. SERENA sleeps on a tall writing desk. SHCHOEV, ALYOSHA, and STERVETSEN are still awake at the table. Through the open window, stars are visible over the district.
SHCHOEV: You offer too little, Mister Bourgeois Scientist. You seem to be forgetting that this product is perishable. Or else you forget the difference between market prices and what the government pays for a product—but that difference is quite something!42 Do you know where we keep our Party lines?
STERVETSEN: I am not in possession of this fact, Comrade Shchoev.
SHCHOEV: Well, if you lack understanding, you shouldn’t be bargaining. Do you imagine we keep our superstructure heaped up in a barn somewhere like bales of hay? Do you think we just hire a watchman, at the lowest wage category, pay him twice a month, buy him some felt boots for the winter—and that’s that?! You’re a fine one, you foreign interventionist devil!
KUZMA (in his sleep): The Roman Catholic Pope…R-r-reptiles…
SHCHOEV: You’re right, Kuzma—one hundred percent and then some! And you, sir, are an agent of the bourgeoisie…
STERVETSEN: I’m not an agent. I’m a cultural personality of Europe.
SHCHOEV: It’s all the same. Once you enter our periphery, you no longer possess a personality. I’m the personality here…Just think a little further—calculate how much each idea costs us in storage alone! Figure it out: we store each idea in millions of seasoned personalities, each of which not only has to be fed—but also to be insured, protected from decay, and thoroughly worked over, so that the air inside them doesn’t turn bad and cause the directive to molder and rot. A line is a delicate product, Mister Scientist—we’re not just talking about some mushroom!
YEVSEI (in his sleep): Didn’t we have our share of problems with those mushrooms, Ignat Nikanorovich?
SHCHOEV: Then you must add up the construction costs for each line!
STERVETSEN: But is your soul really manufactured like some industrial product?
SHCHOEV: Our soul is the superstructure, you idiot! The superstructure rising over the interrelationships of stuff! Of course we manufacture it! In our district consumers’ union a single ideological resolution took us three whole years. The attendance of forty thousand members was required in order to clarify a line of central importance. Fourteen campaigns were carried out among the masses! Thirty-seven of our senior instructors were thrown into the thick of our membership for a period of eighteen months! Two hundred and fourteen meetings were held with a combined attendance of seven thousand of our constituent souls! On top of this, you must figure in the general assemblies, where the total must have been a matter of millions!…That’s what it takes to construct a single line! And you want to purchase the entire superstructure! The whole of Europe won’t even be enough to transport it. And where’s your packaging? You don’t have a suitable international personality…
KUZMA: The Roman Catholic Pope…
SHCHOEV: The Pope, Kuzma, will not do. He is a pitiful scheming opportunist. (Pensively) A vile simplifier of the Party line of Jesus Christ and nothing more.
ALYOSHA: Comrade Shchoev, let me transport it to them. Within me lies a mass of revolutionary spirit! I sense everything in advance of the future. I ache all over from the boredom and misery of foreign capitalism!
STERVETSEN: I don’t understand…I nourish myself with food, but I live with my soul. In the West our hearts have grown quiet, but your hearts…are shock workers of joy hammering in your chests. Our poor intelligentsia wish for your soul. We’re just asking if we can have it a little cheaper—we have a crisis and our minds are full of sorrow.
SHCHOEV: You have my sympathy. But what can we do with you when you’re such beggars? Our ruble, my brother, is a controlled currency.
KUZMA: We need to come to an understanding with capita
lism.
ALYOSHA: Better to lie there in silence, Kuzma, now that I’ve fixed you up.
MIUD (in her sleep): Don’t wake me up, Kuzya, I’m seeing a dream.
SHCHOEV: I know, Kuzma, what has to be done. I don’t want to, but I must. He, the interventionist devil, is never going to understand that the resolutions we construct are giants of consciousness. He wants to buy them for nothing. Excavating the Kuzbass coalfields will prove cheaper and quicker than the completion of our district regulations! Hey, Yevsei!
YEVSEI (in his sleep): Hmm?
SHCHOEV: What did it cost us to construct our district regulations?
YEVSEI: Just a minute, Ignat Nikanorovich! Er, according to executive estimate number 48/11, forty thousand rubles and a few kopecks, excluding the expenditure of human resources during public meetings.
SHCHOEV (to STERVETSEN): See! And you wanted to purchase an entire line! You’d be better off with a small directive—I can let you have one at a discount.
STERVETSEN: Really? And does it come together with your enthusiasm?
SHCHOEV: We don’t deal in defective goods! Your merchant bourgeoisie has had no cause to complain of us.
STERVETSEN: And what funds do you require of us?
SHCHOEV: Yevsei!
YEVSEI (dozing): Huh?
SHCHOEV: How much would you and I charge for a small directive, including all our markups?
YEVSEI: Thirty-seven rubles apiece, Ignat Nikanorovich! That’s the cost of a suit cut to fit the average member of the intelligentsia.
STERVETSEN: I have suits with me!
YEVSEI: Then hand them over!
ALYOSHA (to YEVSEI): Don’t take anything from him. Let me give you my own shirt and trousers!
YEVSEI: You can hang on to those old britches—you certainly didn’t pay foreign currency for material like that!
ALYOSHA: You devils! I’ll kill you with my bare hands! This comrade wants to immerse himself in our ideals, and you—
YEVSEI: We are undressing him so he can dive in and cleanse himself completely.
SHCHOEV: Alyosha, calm your psychology! This isn’t a private establishment.
STERVETSEN: Seren!
SERENA: Oui?
STERVETSEN: Where’s our wardrobe?
SERENA: Straightaway, Papa!
She gets up and goes into the corner, where there are two suitcases. YEVSEI moves in on the suitcases too.
ALYOSHA (to SHCHOEV): What you’re selling him isn’t an ideal—it’s mere bureaucracy! I’ll inform the Party!
SHCHOEV: You’re a hundred percent right. Let bureaucracy attack the bourgeoisie too—let them too start to itch all over. (Pensively) Bureaucracy…We’ll set it against capitalism—and good-bye, Fascists! Look how scared they were by our timber, the dratted demagogues! They should be grateful we’re selling them timber! We could have been making paper from that wood, processing a soul from that paper, and then setting that soul loose on them…That really would have given them something to cry about…
In the meantime YEVSEI has cast off his trousers and padded jacket and re-dressed himself in a foreign suit.
YEVSEI (takes a folder of papers and offers one sheet to STERVETSEN. Holding the folder open): Sign in receipt!
STERVETSEN (signs, takes the paper, then reads): “Circularly. On the principles of autoarousal of enthusiasm.” We like that. Let us have still more of your mood!
YEVSEI: All right. Ignat Nikanorovich, here’s a jacket for your old woman.
SHCHOEV: Yes, give it to me, Yevsei! An old bat is a sentient being too.43
YEVSEI removes a brightly colored jacket from the suitcase and tosses it onto SHCHOEV’s desk. STERVETSEN signs another receipt and receives a second document.
STERVETSEN (reading): “Partial Additional Notes to the Regulations for Cultural Work”—very good!
SHCHOEV: There you are! Study, feel, and you will become a decent member of the class.
STERVETSEN: Thank you!
KUZMA (stands up, takes from somewhere inside himself the paper given to him by the LOCAL POSTMAN, and hands it to STERVETSEN): Here!
STERVETSEN (taking the document): I thank you kindly.
KUZMA: Gimme, r-r-reptile!
STERVETSEN: Please, help yourself.
STERVETSEN brings KUZMA a small, open suitcase. KUZMA takes a brightly colored vest and some trousers and calms down.
ALYOSHA (to SHCHOEV): Why is it, Comrade Shchoev, that when I look at you, and at almost everyone, my heart starts to ache?
SHCHOEV: It’s still unseasoned, that’s why it aches!
KUZMA: No peace…Eclectical.
SHCHOEV: Precisely, Kuzma! There’s no peace…I don’t sleep nights—and what do I hear from above? “Your tempos aren’t enough!” I want some tenderness from the superstructure, but they just tell me to find my own joy…I’m bored, Kuzma!
KUZMA: They’re tearing toward the future…R-r-reptiles…
MIUD stirs and opens her eyes.
SHCHOEV: Yes, Kuzma, they’re tearing along!…O Lord, Lord, if only you truly existed!
YEVSEI (rummaging about in the suitcases): There are still good things here, Ignat Nikanorovich! Maybe there’s some small Party line we can sell them in exchange for more foreign goods?
SHCHOEV: All right, Yevsei…We will, after all, remain standing even without the Party line. And if we collapse, we’ll just keep on living lying down…Ah, wouldn’t it be good to live lying down for a while!
ALYOSHA: Go on then—sell them the whole superstructure at once! We won’t miss it—we’ll see a soul grow up out of its remnants!
SHCHOEV: You’re right, Alyosha. But where can we get hold of the superstructure all in one, so we can invoice it as a single item?
ALYOSHA: The entire superstructure, Comrade Shchoev, is present within you. You, after all, are the most organized man in the district! As for the rest of us, we have no superstructure. We’re the lower mass, you’ve said it yourself.
SHCHOEV: That could well be! I do, all the time, feel something truly great—only I keep saying the wrong thing.
STERVETSEN: Your feeling is just what we need!
MIUD: Sell them Shchoev, Alyosha. He is the bastard of socialism.
ALYOSHA (quietly): I’ve been sensing everything for a while, Miud. Lie in sleep a while longer.
SHCHOEV: So it’s true, is it, Yevsei? I’m to sell my soul for the sake of the Soviet Socialist Republic?44 Yes, I shall doom myself for the sake of socialism—so let socialism be content, let the young ones remember me. Ah, Yevsei, I long to perish—the entire international proletariat will weep for me. Sad music will resound throughout Europe and in other parts. In exchange for hard currency, carrion bourgeois will consume the soul of a proletarian!
YEVSEI: They will gobble you up, Ignat Nikanorovich, and steal our enthusiasm. And without you, the whole Soviet Socialist Republic will be orphaned—and what will we do then? Who will stand at our head? (Contorts his face for weeping, but tears are unable to flow. In anguish he puts on a pince-nez from the pocket of the suit, formerly STERVETSEN’s, that he is now wearing.)
SHCHOEV: You may well be right, Yevsei! Think this over and report later.
ALYOSHA: There isn’t anything to think over. Drive a harder bargain with the bourgeoisie for your torso, in which your ideological soul is quivering! Or have you stopped loving the republic, you bastard?
STERVETSEN (to SHCHOEV): Please, I beg you…If you could…the superstructure…the psyche of joy…I beg you to ensoul Europe with the whole heart of your culture. Let’s set off for our world!
SHCHOEV: To stand at your head, yes?
STERVETSEN: You communicate truly. We need your entire enterprise of culture.
Indistinctly and fearfully, SERENA mutters in French in her sleep.45
SHCHOEV: Something has frightened the young lady.
YEVSEI: There’s no Party line—that’s why she’s afraid. Class consciousness is disintegrating.
ALYOSHA: Go on, Comrade Shchoe
v! Ask for a million!
SHCHOEV: I’m worth somewhat more than that sum. What do you think, Yevsei?
YEVSEI: I’ve puzzled over this and thought everything through. Ignat Nikanorovich, as our leading superstructure-in-chief, must remain in the Soviet Socialist Republic because the Soviet Socialist Republic is dearer to us than the remaining entirety of vile dry land.
SHCHOEV: You’re right, Yevsei!
ALYOSHA: Get along, both of you, to the other world. There’s no one we hold less dear…
YEVSEI: Wait a minute, Alyosha, before you overstep into extremism…I reckon we can quickly locate a suitably progressive personality among the members of our cooperative. Let one of them journey into Fascism and give it an appropriate mood. To us it’s empty piffle—all they want is the spirit, and spirit is nothing. We’ve nowhere to put it—what we need is materialism!
SHCHOEV: Could we let them have Opornykh?
YEVSEI: Our Petya? He’s a fool, we hold him dear…
SHCHOEV: How about Godovalov, then?
YEVSEI: Unseasoned. Always full of joy about one thing or another.
SHCHOEV: Some female or other?
YEVSEI: They’ll demand a discount, Ignat Nikanorovich. It’s not worth it.
SERENA (in her sleep): Oh Papa, Papa, I love this Soviet Alyosha so much, and I can’t wake up from our sadness.
STERVETSEN: Sleep, little girl of ours.
SERENA: But Papa, this happens as rarely as life itself. Only once.
YEVSEI: A fine line this fool of a girl has decided to follow!
SHCHOEV: Well, who can we send with this burden of spirit?
KUZMA:…A quiet, rational constituent element.
SHCHOEV (of KUZMA): He thinks almost like me. Let’s send a quiet, rational element.
YEVSEI: Lie down for the time being and rest, Ignat Nikanorovich. Tomorrow we’ll call the members together and take bids for the best ideologicality. There’s sure to be some element or other we can send.
SHCHOEV: You’re very smart, Yevsei! Good-bye, Mister Bourgeois Scientist. Farewell, Kuzma!
KUZMA: Sleep, activists!
SHCHOEV: Kuzma, are you alive?
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays Page 7