This is the fifth zone, the ticket costs thirty-five kopecks, the train ride takes an hour and twenty minutes, the northern branch, a branch of acacia or, let’s say, lilac; it blooms with white flowers, smells of creosote, of dust from the carriage platform, of tobacco smoke, appears faintly along the right-of-way, in the evening returns on tiptoe to the orchard and listens attentively to the movement of electric trains, shudders from rustling sounds, then the flowers close and sleep, giving in to the demands of the solicitous bird called rossignol; the branch is asleep, but the trains, placed symmetrically along its course, resembling the links in a chain, rush feverishly in the darkness, calling each flower by name, condemning to insomnia irritable old station hags, accordion players—legless and blinded by war—in railroad compartments, the grayish-blue seasonal railroad workers in orange vests, wise professors and mad poets, dacha outsiders and losers, anglers of early and late fish tangled in springy plaits of transparent fishing line, and elderly island buoy-keepers, whose faces, swaying over the black water of the fairway that resonates like copper, are interchangeably pale or scarlet, and finally, dock workers who seem to hear the ringing of the untied boat chains, splashing of oars, and rustling of sails; after putting Gogol’s buttonless overcoats around their shoulders, they come out from their guardhouses and walk across the shore’s porcelain-like sand, down the dunes and down the grassy slopes; the delicate and weak shadows of the workers fall on reeds and heather, and their homemade pipes glow like pieces of rotting maple wood, attracting surprised night butterflies; but the branch is asleep, having folded the flower petals, and the trains that stumble on the rail joints won’t wake it up for any reason and won’t shake off even one drop of dew—sleep sleep branch permeated with creosote in the morning wake up and bloom later finish blooming pour your petals in the eyes of the signal posts and dancing in the rhythm of your wooden heart laugh at train stations sell yourself to those who pass by or depart cry and shout getting naked in the mirrored compartments what’s your name I’m called Vetka I’m a branch of acacia I’m a branch of the railroad I’m Veta impregnated by the gentle bird called rossignol I’m pregnant with the future summer and with the crash of the freight train here take me take me I’m wilting anyway that’s quite inexpensive at the station I cost no more than a ruble and I’m sold by tickets and if you want ride just like that for free there will be no inspector he’s sick wait I’ll undo it myself you see I am all white as snow well shower me shower me whole with kisses nobody will notice the petals are invisible on white and I’m tired of everything sometimes I appear to myself simply as an old hag who walks her whole life over the burning hot locomotive slag on the railroad embankment she’s totally old hideous I don’t want to be an old hag my darling no I don’t want to I know I’ll die soon on the rails I’m in pain I’ll be in pain let me go when I die let me go these wheels are in axle grease your palms what are your palms in these gloves I told a lie I’m Veta pure white branch I bloom you don’t have the right I dwell in orchards don’t shout I’m not shouting the approaching train is shouting tra-ta-tata what’s the matter tra-ta-ta what tra who’s there ta where there where there Veta branch willow willow’s branch there outside the window in that house tra-ta-ta-toom about whom about what about a willow branch about wind stream streetcars streetcars cars evening’s good tickets tick let’s what’s not here Lethe river Lethe is not here for you cars hue Veta hue Alpha Beta Gamma etcetera but no one knows this because no one wanted to teach us Greek it was an unforgivable mistake on their part it’s their fault we can’t properly list even one ship while the running Hermes resembles a flower but we almost don’t understand this that and the other Cape Horn miss blow the heads off but the drum of course beat tra-ta-ta question is this the conductor answer no the constrictor why are you shouting are you sick it just sounded like it to you I’m fine it’s the approaching train forgive me now I know exactly it was the approaching train because you know I fell asleep and suddenly heard I didn’t know if someone was singing or not or note that note this net that net too that netto brutto Italy Italian man Dante man Bruno man Leonardo an artist architect entomologist if you want to see flying on four wings go to the moats of the Milan fortress and you will see black dragonflies a ticket to Milan even two for me and Mikheev Medvedev I want to see dragonflies flying in willows on rivers in moats overgrown with uncut grass down the main railroad of the constellation Veta in the thickets of heather where Tinbergen a man from Holland married his colleague and they soon saw clearly that ammophila finds its way home very unlike philanthus and of course beat the tambourine who’s on the linking platform clink tam-ta-ta form tam-ta-ta-tam there a simple happy song is played on a reed pike on a little Vetka branch of the railroad tra-ta-ta tra-ta-tat a cat married a tomcat tomcat Tinbergen dancing a nightmare a witch she’s lived forever with the excavator operator she doesn’t let me sleep at six in the morning sings in the kitchen prepares food for him in huge pots blazing fires are burning and boiling cauldrons are churning it’s necessary to give her some name if the tomcat is Tinbergen she will be the witch Tinbergen she dances in the entrance hall from the early morning and does not let me sleep sings about the tomcat and most likely is very pretentious. Why most likely? Haven’t you seen how she dances? No, it seems to me I never saw her at all. I’ve been living with her in the same apartment for many years but the thing is that the witch Tinbergen is absolutely not the same old woman who is registered here and whom I see every morning and every evening in the kitchen. This old woman is someone else; her name is Trachtenberg, Sheina Solomonovna Trachtenberg, she’s Jewish, retired, she’s a lonely retiree, and every morning I say to her: Good morning, and in the evening: Good evening. She answers, she’s very plump, has reddish-gray hair and curls, she’s about sixty-five and we practically don’t talk to each other, we simply have nothing to talk about, but from time to time, approximately once every other month, she asks me for my record player and always plays on it one and the same record. She doesn’t listen to anything else; she doesn’t have any other records. And what kind of record is that one? I’ll tell you in a second. Let’s assume I’m coming home. From somewhere. I should note that I know beforehand when Trachtenberg will ask for the record player, I can predict a few days in advance that soon, quite soon indeed, she’ll say: Listen, my dear, do me a favor, how’s your record player? I’m walking up the stairs and I feel it: Trachtenberg is already standing there, behind the door, in the hall, waiting for me. I enter boldly. Boldly. I enter. Good evening. Boldly. Evening’s good, my dear, do me a favor. I take the record player out of the closet. The record player is from before the war, bought sometime and somewhere. By someone. It has a red case, it’s always covered with dust because even though I dust the room, as our good, patient mother taught us, I never have time for the record player. I’ve not used it for a long time. First of all, I don’t have records, and, second, the record player doesn’t work, it’s broken, the spring cracked long ago and the turntable doesn’t spin; trust me, Sheina Solomonovna, I say, the record player doesn’t work and you know it. It doesn’t matter, Trachtenberg answers, just one little record. Ach, only one, I say. Yes-yes-yes—Sheina smiles; practically all her teeth are gold, she wears eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames and powders her face—one little record. She takes the record player, carries it to her room, and bolts the door. And about ten minutes later I hear the voice of Iakov Emmanuilovich. But you didn’t say who Iakov Emmanuilovich was. Don’t you remember him? He was her husband, he died when I and you were about ten years old and we lived with our parents in the room in which I or you live alone today—one of us does. And yet—who precisely? What’s the difference! I’m telling you such an interesting story and you begin to pester me again; after all, I don’t pester you; in my opinion we’ve agreed once and for all there’s absolutely no difference between us, or do you want to go there again? Forgive me, in the future I’ll try not to be a nuisance to you; you do understand that not everything is right with my memory.
And you think all is well with mine? All right, forgive me, please, forgive me, I didn’t want to interrupt you. And so, Iakov died from his medicine, he poisoned himself with something. Sheina tormented him horribly, demanded some kind of money, she assumed her husband was hiding from her several thousand rubles, while he was just an ordinary pharmacist, a chemist, and I’m sure he had no money. I think Sheina simply teased him by demanding money. She was about fifteen years younger than Iakov and, according to the stories told on the benches in our courtyard, she cheated on him with Sorokin, the building superintendent who had one arm and who later, a year after Iakov’s death, hanged himself in the empty garage. A week before that he sold his car, which had been seized during the war and brought from Germany. If you remember, the people on the benches liked to discuss why Sorokin needed a car: He couldn’t drive it anyway and obviously he wasn’t going to hire a driver. And then everything became clear. Whenever Iakov left on business trips or had an overnight shift at the pharmacy, Sorokin led Sheina to the garage and there, in the car, she cheated on Iakov. What a blessing, the people on the benches used to say, what a blessing, your own car, they’d say, apparently it’s not even necessary to drive it: You come to the garage, lock yourself in from the inside, turn on the lights, fold the seats back—and please, have a good time to your heart’s content. Bravo Sorokin, the people in the courtyard used to say, it’s no problem that he’s only got one arm. Describe our courtyard, what it was like then, that many years back. I would say it was more of a dump than a courtyard. Feeble linden trees grew there, two or three garages were nearby, and behind the garages, mountains of broken brick and all kinds of trash. But mainly old gas stoves lay scattered there, about three or four hundred; they were brought to our courtyard from all the neighboring houses immediately after the war. Because of those gas stoves our courtyard always smelled like a kitchen. Whenever we opened the doors of the ovens, the doors squeaked horribly. And why did we open the doors, why? I’m surprised you don’t understand it. We kept opening the doors in order to immediately slam them shut as hard as we could. But shouldn’t we return to the people who lived around our courtyard? We knew many of them. No, no, they are so boring; I’d like to talk about something else now. You see, essentially there is something wrong with our time, we understand time incorrectly. You haven’t forgotten how once, many years ago, we met our teacher Norvegov at the station? No, I haven’t forgotten, we met him at the station. He said that an hour earlier he had left the banks of the reservoir, where he was busy fishing with mosquito grubs. He actually had a fishing rod and a bucket with him, and I managed to discern that some creatures, but not fish, were swimming in the bucket. Our geographer Norvegov built a dacha in the vicinity of that station, only on the other side of the river, and we visited him quite often. But what else did our teacher say to us that day? Geographer Norvegov said something like this to us: Young man, I am sure you noticed what kind of beautiful weather has been lingering for days around here. Do you think our respected dacha dwellers deserve such a treat? Doesn’t it seem to you, my young comrade, it would be the right time for a storm, for a tempest to hit? Norvegov looked at the sky, shading his eyes from the sun. And it will hit, my dear boy, and how it’ll hit— it’ll scatter everything to the wind! And not just some day, but if not today then tomorrow for sure. Incidentally, do you ever think about it, do you believe in it?
Pavel Petrovich stood in the middle of the platform; the station clock read two fifteen and he was wearing his usual light hat, covered entirely with little holes as if it were eaten by moths or punctured many times by the inspector’s ticket punch, while actually the holes were made in the factory so that the buyer’s head, in this case Pavel Petrovich’s head, would not sweat during hot spells. And besides that, they thought at the factory, the dark holes on the light background have to mean something, to be worth something, have to be better than nothing—that is, it is better with the holes than without, they decided at the factory. Fine, but what else did our teacher wear that summer and in general in the best months of those unforgettable years, when we and he lived near the same station, although his dacha was in the settlement on the other side of the river and ours was in one of those settlements that were on the same side as the station? It’s quite difficult to answer this question; I don’t recall exactly what Pavel Petrovich was wearing. It’s easier to say what he wasn’t wearing. Norvegov never wore shoes. At least in the summer. And on this hot day on the platform, on the old wooden platform, he could’ve easily gotten a splinter in his foot or in both feet at once. Yes, that could’ve happened to anyone, but not to our teacher; you understand, he was so small and frail that whenever you saw him running down the dacha trail or the school corridor, you had the impression his bare feet didn’t touch the ground or the floor at all, and when he stood that day in the middle of the wooden platform, it seemed he didn’t stand on it but somehow hovered above it, above its crumbling planks, above all its cigarette butts, burnt matches, ice-cream sticks sucked clean, used tickets, as well as the dried-up and therefore invisible passengers’ spittles of different merits. Let me interrupt you, perhaps I misunderstood something. Did Pavel Petrovich go barefoot even to school? No, apparently I didn’t say it right, I wanted to say he walked barefoot at the dacha, but perhaps he didn’t put on shoes even in the city when he was going to work, and we just didn’t notice. Or perhaps we noticed, but it wasn’t very obvious. Yes, for some reason not very, in such cases much depends on the individual himself and not on all those who look at him, yes, I do recall, not very. But regardless of what happened when school was in session, you definitely know that in the summer Norvegov wore no shoes. Exactly. As our father once remarked, lying in a hammock with a newspaper in his hands, why would Pavel need shoes, particularly in such heat! Only we, miserable official drones that we are, continued our father, don’t give our feet any rest at all: if not boots then galoshes, if not galoshes then boots—and you suffer like that for ages. When it rains, you have to dry your shoes; when it’s sunny, watch out so they don’t crack. And the main thing—every morning you have to bother with shoe polish. And Pavel is a free man and a dreamer; he’ll even die barefoot. He’s a loafer, your Pavel—said our father—that’s why he’s a barefoot tramp. He probably spent all his money on the dacha, is up to his ears in debt, and he keeps going there to fish or to cool off on the shore—here’s a dacha resident from hell! His house is worse than our shed, and he puts a weather vane on the roof, just think—a weather vane! I ask him, the fool: Why the weather vane, it just clicks for no reason. And he answers me from there, from the roof: Many things can happen, citizen prosecutor, for instance, the wind blows and blows in one direction, and suddenly changes. You, he says, are fine, you, I see, read newspapers all the time, and there, of course, they write about it, that is about the weather, while I, you know, don’t subscribe to anything, therefore for me a weather vane is an absolutely necessary thing. You, he says, will learn from newspapers right away if anything is wrong, but I’ll orient myself by the weather vane; what could be more accurate. Nothing can be more accurate—our father told us, reclining in the hammock with a newspaper in his hands. Then our father scrambled out of the hammock, walked for a while—hands clasped behind his back—among the pines filled with hot resin and juices of the earth, picked a few strawberries from the garden and ate them, looked at the sky, where at the moment no clouds, no planes, and no birds were present, yawned, shook his head, and said, having Norvegov in mind: Well, let him thank God I’m not his boss, I’d make him dance, he’d study the wind you know where, the miserable idler, barefoot tramp, pathetic wind-chaser. Poor geographer, our father didn’t have the tiniest dose of respect for him, that’s what happens when you don’t wear shoes. To tell the truth, by the time we met Norvegov on the platform, he, Pavel Petrovich, quite clearly couldn’t care less whether our father respected him or not because by that time he, our mentor, didn’t exist, he had died in the spring of such-and-such, that is more than two yea
rs before our meeting on the above-mentioned platform. That’s why I’m saying we have a problem with time; let’s try to look into it. He was sick for many months, he had a serious lingering illness, and he knew perfectly well he would die soon but pretended otherwise. He remained the merriest, more precisely, the only merry person in school, and he joked endlessly. He said he felt so thin he feared being carried away by some accidental wind. The doctors— laughed Norvegov—forbid me from coming any closer than one kilometer to the windmills, but the forbidden fruit is sweet: I’m irresistibly drawn to them; they stand right next to my house, on the wormwood hills, and one day I won’t be able to resist. In the dacha settlement where I live, I’m called a wind-chaser and a weather vane, but tell me, is it so bad to be known as a wind-chaser, especially if you are a geographer? A geographer is even required to be a wind-chaser, it’s his area of expertise, what do you think, my young friends? Not to give in to depression, he shouted defiantly, waving his hands—right?—to live at the full bicycle speed, to bask in the sun and swim, to catch butterflies and dragonflies of different colors, particularly those magnificent mourning cloaks and sulfurs, so abundant at my dacha! What else—asked the teacher, patting his pockets to find matches and cigarettes and to have a smoke—what else? Be aware, friends, there is no happiness in the world, nothing like that, nothing similar to it, but instead—Lord!—there is, after all, peace and freedom. A contemporary geographer, just like a mechanic, a plumber, or a general, lives only once. So live in the wind, whippersnappers, more compliments to the ladies, more music, smiles, boat trips, resorts, knightly tournaments, duels, chess games, breathing exercises, and other nonsense. And if someday someone calls you a wind-chaser—continued Norvegov, thundering through the entire school with the discovered box of matches—don’t be offended: It’s not so bad. Because what should I fear facing eternity, if today the wind tousles my hair, freshens my face, blows into the collar of my shirt, flows through my pockets, and rips the buttons off of my jacket, while tomorrow it breaks useless old buildings, uproots oaks, stirs and swells reservoirs, and carries the seeds from my orchard all over the world—what should I fear, I, geographer Pavel Norvegov, an honest suntanned man from the fifth suburban zone, a modest but well-qualified pedagogue, whose thin but still-regal hand from morning until evening keeps turning the empty planet made of the deceptive papier-mâché? Give me time—and I’ll prove to you which one of us is right; one day I’ll whirl your squeaking lazy ellipsoid so hard your rivers will start flowing backwards, you’ll forget your false books and newspapers, you’ll get nauseated hearing your own voices, last names, and titles, you’ll unlearn how to read and write, and you’ll want to prattle like aspen leaves in August. An angry draft will blow down the names of your streets, lanes, and sickening signs, and you’ll want the truth. O, lousy cockroach tribe! O, brainless Panurge’s herd, covered with the excrement of flies and bedbugs! You’ll want the great truth. And then I’ll come. I’ll come and bring with me those you killed and humiliated, and I’ll say: Here is your truth and vengeance against you. And from horror and anguish the servile manure flowing in your veins in place of blood will turn into ice. Masters of towns and dachas, be afraid of the Sender of the Wind, fear the breezes and drafts because they give birth to hurricanes and tornadoes. I, the geographer of the fifth suburban zone, a man who is rotating the hollow cardboard globe, am telling you this. And saying so, I take eternity as my witness—isn’t that right, my young helpers, my dear contemporaries and colleagues, isn’t that right?
A School for Fools Page 2