But why did you pick it, was it really necessary? After all, you don’t like—I know—you don’t like to pick flowers, you only like to watch them or touch them gently with your hand. Of course, I shouldn’t have, I didn’t want to, believe me, at first I didn’t want to, I never wanted to, it seemed to me if I picked it, one day something unpleasant would happen—to me or to you, or to other people, or to our river, for example, couldn’t it get sucked up? You just pronounced a strange word, what did you say, what word was it—shaku? No, you made it up, you didn’t hear it right, there was a different word, similar to this one, but not the same, now I can’t recall. And besides, what was I talking about a moment earlier? Could you help me reconstruct the broken thread of my thoughts? We were discussing how one day Trachtenberg unscrewed the faucet handle in the bathroom and hid it somewhere, and when the maintenance man came, he stood a long time in the bathroom and just stared. He didn’t say anything for a while because he didn’t understand what was going on. The water was running noisily, the bathtub was gradually filling up, so the maintenance man asked Trachtenberg: Where is the handle? And the old woman answered: I have a record player (not true—only I have a record player), but I don’t have the handle. Yet there’s also no handle in the bathroom, said the maintenance man. It’s your problem, citizen, don’t blame me—and she went into her room. And the maintenance man came to the door and started to knock, but neither Trachtenberg nor Tinbergen opened it. I was standing in the hall, thinking, and when the maintenance man turned towards me and asked what was to be done, I said: Knock and it shall be opened unto you. He started to knock again and soon Trachtenberg opened the door and he inquired once more: Where is the faucet handle? I don’t know, objected old Tinbergen, ask the young man. And she pointed with her bony finger in my direction. The maintenance man remarked: Perhaps the boy doesn’t have all his marbles, but I have a feeling he isn’t so stupid that he’d unscrew faucet handles; you did it and I’ll complain to the building administrator Sorokin. And then Tinbergen burst out laughing in the maintenance man’s face. Ominously. So the maintenance man went away to complain. And I was standing in the hall, thinking. Coats and hats were hanging on the coatrack, and two containers for shipping furniture stood here. These things belonged to the neighbors, that is, to Trachtenberg-Tinbergen and her excavator operator. At any rate, the greasy eight-wedged cap was definitely his because the old woman wore only hats. I frequently stand in the hall and inspect various objects on the coatrack. It seems to me they are good-natured; I’m at ease with them, and as long as nobody wears them, I’m not afraid of them at all. In addition, I think about the containers—what kind of wood they are, how much they cost, and on what train and on what railroad branch they were brought to our city.
Dear student so-and-so, I, the author of this book, imagine it quite clearly—it’s a long freight train. Its boxcars, mostly brown, are covered with chalk inscriptions—letters, numbers, words, and whole phrases. Apparently on some of the boxcars workers wearing special railroad uniforms and caps with lead bows made computations, notes, and calculations. Let’s assume the train has been standing on the siding for several days and it’s not known yet—nobody knows—when it’ll move again, and nobody knows where it will go. And then a commission comes to the siding, looks at the seals, knocks on the wheels with hammers, and peeks into axle boxes, making sure there are no cracks in the metal and that sand hasn’t been added to the grease. The commission is arguing, swearing, it’s been bored for a long time by its monotonous work and would gladly retire. But how many years are left until retirement?—the commission ponders. The commission takes a piece of chalk and writes on anything within reach, usually on one of the boxcars: the year of birth—such-and-such, the length of employment—so many years, therefore until retirement—precisely that many. Then the next commission goes to work; it owes a lot to the colleagues from the first commission and that is why the second commission does not argue and swear but tries to do everything quietly and even does not use the hammers. This commission is sad; it also takes chalk out of its pocket (Here I should note in parentheses that the station where the action takes place never, even in times of world wars, could complain about a shortage of chalk. Occasionally, it lacked railroad ties, handcars, matches, molybdenum ore, switch operators, wrenches, rubber hoses, crossing barriers, flowers for decorating the embankments, red banners with the necessary slogans honoring such-and-such or a completely different event, safety brakes, siphons and ash pits, steel and slag, accounting records, warehouse ledgers, ashes and diamonds, locomotive smokestacks, speed, shotgun shells and marijuana, levers and alarm clocks, amusements and firewood, record players and loaders, experienced letter carriers, surrounding forests, rhythmical timetables, sleepy flies, cabbage soup, kasha, bread, and water. But there was always so much chalk at the station that, as a note from the telegraph agency pointed out, one would have to put together so many freight trains of such-and-such payload capacity to haul away all the potential chalk from the station. To be more exact, not from the station but from the chalk quarries around the station. And the station itself was called Chalk, therefore the river—the foggy white river with shores of chalk—could not be called anything else but Chalk. In short, everything here, at the station and in the settlement, revolved around this soft white stone: People worked in chalk quarries and mines, they received chalky rubles, soiled with chalk, built their houses and streets from chalk, used chalk for whitewash, taught children in schools to write with chalk, washed their hands and bodies with chalk, cleaned their pots and teeth, and, finally, while dying, asked in their wills to be buried at the village cemetery, where in place of earth was chalk and every grave was adorned by a tombstone made of chalk. One would think that the settlement of Chalk was uncommonly clean, completely white and tidy; heavy and light clouds, pregnant with chalky rains permanently hovered above it, and after the rains, the settlement became even whiter and cleaner, that is, completely white, like a fresh sheet in a good hospital. Speaking of the hospital, there was a good large one. In the hospital were miners who got sick and died because they suffered from a special illness that in conversations with each other they called “chalkie.” Chalk dust got into the miners’ lungs, entered their blood, and the blood became weak and thin. They would turn pale, their faces would shine white and ghostly in the darkness of the night shifts, at the time when patients’ packages were delivered and during the visits of relatives they would shine in the windows of the hospital against the background of astonishingly clean curtains, they would shine as a farewell against the background of the premortem pillows, and after that their faces would only shine on photos in family albums. The picture would be glued on a separate page and one of the relatives would carefully outline it with a black pencil. The frame would turn out not very even but festive. However, let’s go back to the second railroad commission that takes chalk out of its pocket and—let’s close the parentheses) and writes on the boxcar: For Petrov—so much for Ivanov—so much; for Sidorov—so much; in sum—so many chalky rubles. The commission keeps walking and writes the word inspected on some boxcars and platforms and on others, to inspect, since it is impossible to inspect everything at once; there is, as a matter of fact, the third commission: let it inspect the remaining boxcars. But besides the commissions, there are also non-commissions at the station, in other words, people who aren’t members of commissions but who are on the outside, busy doing other things or not working at all. Nevertheless, they also can’t overcome their urge to take a piece of chalk and write something on the wall of the boxcar—wooden and warmed by the sun. For instance, a soldier in a khaki cap walks towards the car: Two months until discharge. A miner appears and his white hand traces the laconic: Scum. A D student from the fifth grade whose life is perhaps tougher than the life of us all taken together writes: Maria Stepanovna is a bitch. A woman worker in an orange vest who is responsible for tightening the nuts and cleaning the overpasses by sweeping the trash down onto the rails
knows how to draw the sea. She draws on the car a wavy line and, in fact, the sea appears, and the old beggar who doesn’t know either how to sing or how to play the accordion, but so far hasn’t decided to buy a music box, writes two words: Thank you. Some young man, drunk and disheveled, who has accidentally learned that his girlfriend is cheating, writes in desperation: Three guys made love to Valya. Finally, the train comes out from the siding and travels around various regions of Russia. It consists of boxcars inspected by commissions, decent and indecent words, pieces of broken hearts, memoranda, business notes, idle graphic exercises, laughing and swearing, screams and tears, blood and chalk, white over black and brown, fear of death, compassion for distant and close relatives, shattered nerves, good intentions and rose-colored glasses, rudeness, tenderness, foolishness, and servility. The train is moving, and on the train are the containers belonging to Sheina Solomonovna Trachtenberg, and all of Russia, stepping out on windswept platforms, looks into the train’s eyes and reads the inscriptions—the fleeting book of its own life, the senseless, crude, boring book created by hands of incompetent commissions and pitiful, stupefied people. A number of days later the train arrives at the freight station in our city. The workers of the railroad post office are anxious: they have to notify Sheina Trachtenberg that the containers of furniture have arrived at last. It’s raining outside; the sky is covered with clouds. In the special post-office room at the so-called station’s edge a hundred-watt lightbulb is burning; it disperses the semidarkness and provides comfort. A few anxious post-office workers in blue uniforms are in the room. They anxiously heat up tea on an electric hotplate and anxiously drink it. The room smells of string, sealing wax, and wrapping paper. The window looks out at the rusty rails of the siding; the grass creeps up between the ties and some tiny but beautiful flowers bloom there. It’s very pleasant to look at them through the window. The bottom part of the window is open and for this reason one can clearly hear sounds typical for the junction station: the horn of the coupler, clanking of air hoses and buffers, hissing of pneumatic brakes, whistles of the locomotives, and commands of the dispatcher. Hearing all these sounds is also pleasant, particularly if you are a professional and know how to explain the nature of these sounds, their sense and meaning. And the workers from the railroad post office are precisely such professionals; they have scores of kilometers of travel behind them; at one time they were either in charge of postal boxcars or worked as inspectors of those boxcars, and some of them even worked on international lines and, as is commonly said, saw the world and know what is what. And if one were to ask their supervisor whether it was so . . .
Yes, dear author, exactly like that: to come to his home, to ring the resonant bicycle bell at the door—so that he hears and opens. Who’s there? Teddy Bear, but does the supervisor so-and-so live here? Here. Open up, someone came to ask and get the right answer. Who? Those Who Came. Come back tomorrow, today it’s already late; I and my wife are sleeping. Wake up, since now it’s time to tell the truth. About whom, about what? About the fellows from our office. Why at night? At night all the sounds are more audible: the cry of an infant, the moan of the dying man, the flight of the rossignol, and the cough of the streetcar constrictor: Wake up, open, and answer. Wait, I’ll put on my pajamas. Put them on, you look very good in them, a nice plaid; did you make them yourself or buy them? I don’t remember, I don’t know, I need to ask my wife; Mother, Those Who Came came and they’d like to know whether we made the pajamas ourselves or bought them, and if yes then where and for how much. Yes we made them no bought them it was snowing it was cold we were coming home from the movies and I thought my husband wouldn’t have warm pajamas this winter again I dropped by the department store while you stayed outside to buy bananas there was a line for them and I didn’t particularly hurry first I looked at the rugs and signed up for a meter and a half by meter seventy-five to be delivered three years later because the factory was closed for renovation and then in the section of men’s underwear I immediately saw these pajamas and the Chinese drawers with a top such shaggy ones and I still can’t decide what is better in general I liked the drawers better not only were they inexpensive but the color was right you can sleep in them and go to work in them and at home walk in them but after all we live with neighbors and this means you won’t go out to the hallway or to the kitchen in them while in pajamas it’s all the same decent and even nice so I’ve reserved the pajamas and I go back outside and you’re still standing in line for bananas and I say to you give me the money I’ve reserved pajamas and you say you shouldn’t why it’s probably some kind of complete trash no I say it’s not trash at all but a very decent thing imported with wooden buttons go see for yourself and in front of you stood some older woman with graying hair in a jacket with earrings so plump she turns around and says go ahead go don’t be afraid I’ll stand here all the time and if anything I will say you were here behind me and as for the pajamas she says you shouldn’t argue with your wife I know those pajamas they’ll be a very worthwhile purchase last week I bought them for my entire family for my father for my brother for my husband and I sent a pair to Homel to my son-in-law he’s there now taking courses so don’t even think buy and that’s it because at some other time when you really need them you’ll search for the same pajamas all over town and you’ll be told come at the end of the month come at the end of the month you’ll come at the end of the month and will be told we had them yesterday but we sold them out so don’t even think later you’ll thank your wife and I’ll hold the line for you don’t be afraid and then you say well then fine let’s go and have a look we enter the department store and I ask so do you like them and you shrug your shoulders and answer I don’t know who the hell knows the pajamas are sort of not bad but strange for some reason plaid and the pants in my opinion are too narrow you said this and the salesgirl heard you such a young nice one and she suggests well she says try it look why do we have a booth here definitely not for me I took the pajamas they were hanging on wooden hangers we went behind the curtain there were three large mirrors when you started to undress the snowflakes well not the snowflakes anymore but actually droplets splashed the entire mirror I peeked out from behind the curtain and am yelling to the salesgirl young lady do you have some kind of a rag and she says what do you need it for and I say we need to wipe the mirror and she how come did you splash it yes a little bit after all it’s snowing outside and in the store it’s so warm everything has melted then she takes out yellow flannel from under the counter here you are she says and later asks well have you tried them on and I say no we are still trying I’ll tell you when everything is ready then you’ll peek here advise perhaps the pants really are too narrow later I look and you are already completely dressed in the pajamas and keep twisting in all directions you’ve even squatted twice to check the inseam well how are they I ask and you say well everything is sort of as it should be perhaps the pants are slightly too narrow and the check pattern is disturbing kind of not ours what did you expect I say after all it’s an imported thing and I’m calling the salesgirl to get her advice at that moment she’s had plenty of buyers she answers right away right away but doesn’t come and doesn’t come then you say I’ll go see her myself but I’m not letting you go what are you saying it’s not proper there are people all around but you answer people so what haven’t they seen pajamas they all each of them have ten pair what’s wrong with it what aren’t we people too and you step out of the booth and ask the salesgirl how are they not bad they fit and she says as if made for you even a lot get them you won’t be sorry there is only one and a half pair of this size left before night there will be none they’re going fast then you ask I think the pants are a bit too narrow what do you think the salesgirl answers this is just the fashion popular today the long and wide jacket and the pants the other way but if you want you can make alterations in some places you can let out but here in the jacket on the contrary I would take it in because the jacket is really slightly too wide in the waist b
ut your wife will do it or take it to a tailor and she asks me do you have a sewing machine at home I do but it’s not good earlier I had my mother’s foot-operated Singer but when our daughter was getting married I gave it to her I’m not sorry of course well perhaps just a little but after all my daughter also can’t do without it they now have a growing baby boy they occasionally need to make this or that for him so of course I let my daughter use the Singer and we’ve bought another for ourselves the new one is fully automatic but it’s difficult to work with either it’s bad or I haven’t gotten used to it the stitch comes out uneven it shreds the thread but it would be better to use it than to go to a tailor at the tailor’s it takes a long time and is expensive so we’ll do it at home obviously and the salesgirl says of course do it at home you’ll spend one evening and that’s it but you’ll get good ones they’ll last more than one year and she asks you how about you do you personally like them you smiled even became bashful I think these are fine pajamas you say no need to discuss it then the salesgirl asks do you by any chance work at the railroad we looked at each other how did she guess and I ask her a question how did you know I’m very interested it’s simple she answers your husband is wearing a uniform cap with a hammer and a monkey wrench and my brother also works on the suburban train lines sometimes he comes in the evening and tells me everything about work where and what crash took place all interesting stuff I am even envious that there every day something new happens while here it’s always one and the same will you take them she says then I ask her please wrap the pajamas for us and I’ll go pay and she says yes first go pay and I’ll wrap them right away I went and paid at the cashier’s there was a line and you took the pajamas off in the booth and I saw you carry them to her on the hangers she began wrapping them she even tied them with a ribbon it’s not true Mama it’s not true I remember everything it was a string I have been thinking too how we pack parcels and tie packages at work we have whole balls and rolls of string we always have the string it never ends there’s as much good string as you may want it was string there in the store there in the salesgirl’s hands there we work exceeding the plan don’t worry drop in look us up check ring the bicycle bell at any time we’ll look at the string we’ll read Japanese poets Semen Nikolaev knows their works by heart and is smart altogether he reads a lot.
A School for Fools Page 4