“What, is that all?” Vera asked, straightening up. Manyasha nodded. Vera laughed doubtfully. Manyasha shrugged, as if to say she wasn’t the one that thought it up, so she wasn’t to blame. Vera stopped laughing.
“You know,” she said, “I always suspected something of the sort.”
Manyasha laughed.
“They all say that.”
“Well then,” said Vera, “for a start I’ll try something simple. For instance, make pictures appear on the walls here and have some music playing.”
“I think you’ll be able to manage that,” Manyasha said, “but don’t forget that your efforts might produce unexpected results, something that seems to be entirely unrelated to what you’re trying to do. The connection will only become clear later.”
“But what could happen?”
“You’ll see that for yourself.”
It was some time before she did see, several months in fact, during those repulsive November days when it might be snow your feet are plowing through or it might be water, and it might be mist hanging in the air or it might be steam obscuring the sight of blue militia caps and the crimson bruises of banners held aloft.
What happened was that several proletarians in a festive mood descended into the toilet bearing a large quantity of ideological equipment: immense paper carnations on long green poles and incantations on special plywood sheets. Having relieved themselves, they set their bicolored lances against the walls, fenced off the urinals with their sodden plywood placards (the upper one bore the incomprehensible inscription: “Ninth Pipe-Drawing Brigade”) and settled down for a small picnic in the narrow space in front of the mirror and the washbasin. The smell of fortified wine rapidly overpowered the smell of urine and chlorine. At first there was laughter and conversation, then a sudden silence fell, broken by a coarse male voice:
“You pouring that on the floor deliberately, you fucker?”
“No, ’course not,” an unconvincing tenor replied hastily, “it’s not the usual kind of bottle, the neck’s shorter. I was listening to what you were saying. Try it yourself, Grigory, my hand just automatically...”
There was the sound of a blow striking against something soft and voices raised in approving obscenity, and after that the picnic somehow came to a rapid conclusion and the voices withdrew, echoing hollowly on the staircase up to the boulevard before they finally disappeared. Vera plucked up the courage to glance out of her corner.
A young man with his face beaten to pulp was sitting in the middle of the floor, spitting out blood at regular intervals onto the tiles that were awash with fortified port wine. At the sight of Vera he took fright, leapt to his feet and ran out on to the street, leaving behind in the entranceway a damp, broken carnation and a small board bearing the inscription: “There is no alternative to the paradigm of Perestroika!” Vera had not the slightest idea of the meaning contained in these words, but from her long experience of life she was quite certain that something new had begun, though she could not really believe that she had started it. Just to be on the safe side she picked up the gigantic flower and the placard and carried them into her own small room, which was made out of the two end cubicles. The partition between them had been removed and there was just enough space for a bucket, a mop, and a chair, in which she was able to take an occasional nap.
After this incident everything went on in the same old way for a long time. After all, what can happen in a toilet? Life proceeded smoothly and predictably, only the number of empty bottles that arrived each day began to fall, and people became less friendly.
One day a group of people appeared in the toilet who were clearly not there to relieve themselves. They were dressed in identical denim suits and dark glasses and they brought a folding ruler and one of those special things on a tripod stand (Vera didn’t know what it was called) that people on the street sometimes look through at a stick with special markings held by someone else. The visitors measured the doorway, carefully surveyed the entire premises, and left without making any use of their optical device. A few days later they appeared again, accompanied by a man in a brown rain coat, carrying a brown briefcase (Vera knew him, he was the head of all the toilets in the city). This time the group behaved in a very strange manner: they didn’t discuss anything or measure anything, they just walked backwards and forwards, with their shoulders bumping against the backs of the workers relieving themselves into the urinals (what an uncertain place this world is!) occasionally halting to peer meditatively at something invisible to Vera and the other visitors. Whatever it was, it must have been quite beautiful—she could tell from the smiles on their faces and the remarkably romantic poses they assumed.
Vera could never have expressed her feelings in words, but she understood everything perfectly, and for a few moments there arose before her inner eye a vision of the picture that used to hang in her nursery school: “Comrades Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin at the Building of the White Sea Baltic Canal.” Two days later Vera learned that she was now working in a cooperative.
Her duties, by and large, remained the same as before, but everything in her surroundings changed. Gradually, and yet rapidly, with no delays or stoppages, the place was repaired. First the pale Soviet tiles on the wall were replaced with large tiles bearing images of green flowers. Then the cubicles were remodeled, their walls were paneled with imitation walnut formica, the severe white porcelain bowls of triumphant socialism were replaced by festive pinkish-purple chalices, and a turnstile was installed at the entrance, just like in the subway, except that entrance cost ten kopecks, not five.
When these transformations were completed Vera was given a raise of an entire 100 rubles a month and issued with new work clothes: a red peaked cap and a black garment halfway between overalls and an overcoat. Everything, in fact, was just like in the subway, except that the buttonholes and cockade were not adorned with the letter “S,” but with two crossed streams of gold forged in thin copper. The double cubicle, where previously she could at least take a nap, was now transformed into a closet for toilet paper, and there was no way she could even squeeze inside.
Vera now sat beside the turnstiles, in a special booth like the throne of the Martian Communists in the film Aelita, smiling and changing money. Her movements acquired a smooth joyful rhythm, just like a sales assistant in the Eliseev shop she saw once in her childhood and remembered for the rest of her life. Bright blonde, with a generous, womanly figure, the sales assistant was slicing salmon against the background of a fresco depicting a sun-drenched valley where a cool bunch of grapes hung just half a meter outside reality, and it was morning, and the radio was playing softly, and Vera was a little girl in a red cotton dress.
The money jingled merrily in the turnstiles—every day they took in one and a half or two sacks full of it. “I seem to remember,” Vera thought vaguely, “that somewhere Freud compares excrement to gold. He was certainly no fool, that’s for sure—Why do people hate him so much? And then, that Nabokov...” She became absorbed in her usual unhurried stream of thought, but most of the thoughts consisted of no more than beginnings which had not yet crept as far as their own ends before they were overtaken by others. Life was gradually getting better and better. Green velvet curtains had appeared at the doorway, so that anyone entering had to separate them with his shoulder, and on the wall by the door hung a picture that was bought from a bankrupt diner: in rather strange perspective it depicted a troika of white horses harnessed to a hay-filled sleigh in which three passengers were paying not the slightest attention to the pack of wolves galloping after them in earnest pursuit. There were two men dressed in unbuttoned fur jackets playing accordions, and a woman without an accordion (which made the accordion a sexual characteristic).
The only thing that bothered Vera was the distant rumbling or roaring that she sometimes heard beyond the walls of the toilet—she had no idea what could possibly make such a strange sound under ground, but then she decided it must be the subway and stopped worrying. The c
abins were filled with the rustling of genuine toilet paper—a far cry indeed from the old days. Pieces of soap appeared on the sinks, and beside them hung the boxes of electrical hand dryers. In short, when one regular client told Vera that he visited the toilet as he would a theater, she was not surprised at the comparison, and not even particularly flattered.
The new boss was a young, ruddy-faced guy dressed in a denim jacket and dark glasses, but he only showed up very occasionally, and Vera gathered he had another two or three toilets to keep an eye on. In Vera’s eyes he seemed a mysterious and extremely powerful individual, but one day something happened which made it clear he was by no means in control of everything. When he came in from the street the ruddy-faced young guy usually thrust aside the green velvet curtain with a short, powerful movement of his open hand, then his face appeared, with two black glass ellipses in place of eyes, followed by the sound of his high-pitched voice. This time everything came in reverse order—first Vera heard his high, challenging tenor ringing out on the staircase, answered condescendingly by a gruff bass, and then the curtains parted. But instead of the hand and the dark glasses, what appeared was a denim-clad back that wasn’t so much hunched over as folded. Vera’s boss came backing in, trying to explain something as he went, and striding in after him came a fat elderly gnome with a big red beard, wearing a red cap and a red foreign T-shirt, on which Vera read the words: WHAT I REALLY NEED IS LESS SHIT FROM YOU PEOPLE.
The gnome was tiny, but the way he carried himself made him look taller than everyone else in the place. Glancing quickly around the premises, he opened his briefcase, took out a bundle of seals and applied one of them to a sheet of paper hastily proffered by Vera’s boss. Then he uttered some brief instruction, prodded the young guy with the dark glasses in the belly with his finger, chuckled, and left. Vera didn’t even notice him go. He was standing opposite the mirror, and then he was gone, as though he’d just plunged into the open mouth of some special gnome subway. Following the disincarnation of the midget with the seals Vera’s boss calmed down, grew a lot taller and spoke a few phrases to no one in particular, from which Vera gathered that the gnome really was a very big man; he ruled over all the toilets in Moscow.
“What strange bosses we have nowadays,” Vera muttered to herself, jangling the money in the bowl in front of her and handing out disposable paper towels. “It’s really awful.” She liked to pretend she took everything that happened in just the same way as some abstract Vera working as a cleaner in a toilet ought to take it, and she tried to forget that she herself had stirred up these forces of the underworld, stirred them up for no more than a joke, just so that she could have a picture hanging on the wall (as far as the music was concerned, she felt that wish had already been granted in the two accordions it included). Where Vera’s life had previously been boring and monotonous, it was now eventful and full of meaning. Quite often now Vera saw various remarkable people, such as scientists, cosmonauts, and performers, and once the toilet was even visited by the father of a fraternal nation, General Pot Mir Soup, who was caught short on his way to the Kremlin. He had masses of people with him, and while he was sitting in the stall, three touchingly made-up Young Pioneers played a mournful, drawn-out melody on long flutes right beside Vera’s booth. It was so moving that Vera shed a furtive tear.
One day soon after this incident Vera’s boss arrived with a cassette deck and speakers, and the following day the toilet had music. Vera now had the additional responsibility of turning the cassettes over and changing them. The morning usually began with Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem,” and the first excited visitors usually appeared when the passionate soprano in the second movement was imploring the Lord to save her from eternal death.
“Libera me domini de morte aeterna,” Vera sang along quietly, jangling the copper in her bowl in time with the powerful blows of the invisible orchestra. After that they usually put on Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” or something of the kind, something spiritual in German, and Vera, who could only follow that language with a certain effort, listened as the thin-voiced children merrily gave the Lord who had dispatched them to the world below an assurance of something or other.
“Then for what has the Lord created us?” inquired the doubting soprano, forcefully escorted by two violins.
“In order,” the choir replied confidently, “that we might glorify him.”
“Can this be so?” the soprano queried with renewed doubt.
“Beyond all doubting!” the children’s voices sang in confirmation.
Then, as the time approached two or three o’clock, Vera would put on Mozart, and her troubled soul would slowly settle into calmness as it glided over the cold marble floor of an immense hall, in which two grand pianos jangled against each other in a minor key. When the evening was really close, Vera put on Wagner, and for a few seconds the Valkyries were confused in their flight into battle by the sight of tiled walls and sinks flickering past beneath their wildly careering steeds.
Everything would have been just wonderful, if not for one strange thing, which at first was hardly noticeable, in fact it almost seemed like a hallucination. Vera began to notice a strange smell, or to put it more bluntly, a stink, to which she had not paid any attention before. For some inexplicable reason the stink appeared when the music began to play, or rather, that was when it manifested itself. It was there all the rest of the time as well, in fact it was a fundamental element of the place, but it went pretty well unnoticed as long as it remained in harmony with everything else. When the pictures appeared on the walls, though, and then on top of that they started playing music, she began to smell that genuine, inexpressible toilet stench that no words can possibly describe, and which is merely hinted at even by the phrase “Mayakovsky’s Paris.”
One evening Manyasha dropped in to see Vera and while they listened to the overture to The Corsair, she suddenly noticed the stink as well.
“Vera,” she asked, “have you never thought about how our will and imagination form these lavatories around us?”
“I have thought about it,” Vera answered. “I’ve been thinking about it for ages and I can’t understand it. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that we ourselves create the world around us and the reason we’re sitting in a public lavatory lies in our own souls. Then you’ll say there really isn’t any public lavatory, there isn’t anything but a projection of inner content on to external object, and what seems like a stink is simply an exteriorized component of the soul. Then you’ll quote something from Sologub...”
“And heaven’s lamps to me proclaimed,” Manyasha interrupted her in a sing-song voice, “that I created nature...”
“That’s it, or something like it. Am I right?”
“Not entirely. You’re making your usual mistake. The fact is that the only interesting thing about solipsism is its practical side. You’ve already managed to do something in this line—this picture with the troika, for example, or these dulcimers—zing, zing! But that stink, why, at what precise moment, do we create that?”
“From the practical point of view I can tell you for certain that it’s no problem for me to clean up the stink, and the toilet as well.”
“Me too,” Manyasha answered, “I clean up the toilet every evening. But what would come after that? Do you really think it’s possible?”
Vera was about to open her mouth to reply, but she suddenly began coughing into her palm, and then carried on coughing for a long time. Manyasha stuck her tongue out at her.
Two or three days went by, and then the green curtains at the entrance were thrust aside by a group of visitors who immediately reminded Vera of that first group, in denim jackets, that had started everything happening. These people were dressed in leather and were even more ruddy-faced, but apart from that they behaved exactly the same as the first group. Soon Vera learned that they were closing down the toilet and turning the place into a shop selling goods on commission.
They kept her on as clea
ner this time too, and even gave her paid leave while the repairs were going on, so that Vera got a good rest and reread several books on solipsism that she hadn’t been able to get around to for ages. When she went back to work the first day, there was nothing left to remind her that the place had once been a toilet. Now just to the right of the entrance there was a long row of shelves where they sold all sorts of knick-knacks. Further in, where the urinals used to be, was a long counter, with a display stand and electronics counter opposite it. Hanging at the far end of the hall were winter clothes—leather raincoats and jackets, sheepskin coats and ladies’ coats, and behind each counter stood a salesgirl. There was a lot less work for her to do now, and just loads of money. Vera now walked around the premises in a new blue overall coat, politely pushing her way through the crowd of customers and wiping the glass surfaces of the counters with a dry flannel rag. Glimmering and glittering behind the glass, like bright, multicolored Christmas-tree tinsel (“All the thoughts of the centuries! All the dreams! All the worlds!” Vera whispered to herself) lay various brands of chewing gum and condoms, plastic clip-on earrings and brooches, spectacles, hand mirrors, jewelry chains and elegant little pencils. After that, during the lunch break, she had to sweep up the dirt that the customers brought in, and then she could take it easy until evening.
Now the music played the whole day long—sometimes even several different types of music—and the stink had disappeared, as Vera proudly informed Manyasha one day when she appeared through the door in the wall. Manyasha frowned.
“I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple. Of course, from one point of view, we really do create our own surroundings, but from another, we ourselves are merely the reflection of all that surrounds us. And therefore the fate of any individual in any country repeats in metaphorical terms what happens to that country—while what happens to the country is made up of thousands of separate lives.”
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 5