Ivan’s padded jacket had soaked up a lot of water and grown heavy, but there wasn’t much further to go to reach Petya’s place. There were fewer and fewer militiamen around and more and more drunks. At last they were surrounded by the tarpaper-roofed greenhouses of Babayasin Prospect, and when Ivan and Valera had drifted with the crowd as far as their destination, they fell out of the column and cut across the line of movement, paying no attention to the whistling and Maying of the parade marshal. They quickly made their way to the familiar entrance and up to the third floor; there was already a smell of hard liquor on the landing by the door of the hostel where Petya lived and Valera, completely forgetting his ominous encounter on the square, livened up and gave Ivan a thump on the shoulder. The hostel was shaking to the sound of music. Petya opened the door and stuck his small head out through the gap—as always, it seemed as though he was standing on a bench behind the door.
“Cheers,” he said without any expression.
“That’s a tremendous racket,” said Valera as he entered the corridor.
“Who is that laboring away?”
“Gentle May,” Petya answered, walking off along the corridor.
Pyotr’s room differed from Ivan’s in the arrangement of the bed and the wardrobe, the number of bottles on the floor and the calendar on the wall—a different naked woman was smiling and holding out a glass of mandarin juice into the room. Ivan thought her green-varnished nails looked like flies that had fallen into the glass and drowned.
Ivan sat on the bed, picked up a magazine from the bedside table, and opened it at random. His eyes met the gaze of an old musketeer wearing a French beret. Valera and Pyotr had struck up a monosyllabic conversation: Ivan filtered out everything except Valera’s occasional colorful bon mot.
“‘Communism has a healthy, correct understanding of the life of each individual which is perfectly compatible with Christianity’, wrote the musketeer, ‘such as serving a transpersonal goal—serving not oneself, but a greater whole.’”
The words somehow filtered very easily into Ivan’s mind—so easily, in fact, that their meaning remained entirely unclear. As Ivan began thinking about them, it suddenly grew darker in the room and the conversation at the table stopped dead. Ivan looked up. An immense two-dimensional plywood bulldozer was drifting by outside the window, painted crimson with the cogs of the open motor painstakingly drawn in. It was astonishing, both because it was so big and because it was made out of a single piece of plywood, specially produced for the purpose by the local factory. But there was a strange discrepancy, which Ivan had noticed during the demonstration as he walked past the contraption standing in the side street and glanced at the green magnesium wheels supporting it—it looked like the chassis from a Tu-720 heavy bomber. At the time he hadn’t realized what was wrong, but now—probably because he could only see the upper part of the agit-monster through the window—he spotted it: the cabin of the bulldozer was absolutely empty. They hadn’t even drawn in the glass. Instead there were just two square holes sawn through the wood, showing gray patches of the wet, distended sky.
The bulldozer drifted past and Ivan, nodding his head as thoughts came crowding in, became absorbed in the magazine as he waited for everyone to get so drunk that he’d be able to slip away unseen. The article obviously fascinated him.
“What kind of sickle are you hammering out of that?”
Ivan looked up. Valera and Petya were staring fixedly at him. Me suddenly realized that for five minutes the room had been absolutely quiet, and he put the magazine down.
“It’s really interesting,” he said, moving his hand closer to the pocket with the revolver, just in case, “about the philosopher Berdyaev.”
“So what’s it say?” Petya asked with a strange smile. “What’s he write about?”
“He has one pretty good idea. That the psychological world of the communist is sharply divided into a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness—the camps of Ormuzd and Ariman. It’s basically a Manichean dualism which exploits the monistic...”
Ivan didn’t even feel the stool hit his face—he realized he must have caught the blow when he looked up from the floor and saw Petya taking a slow step towards him holding it in his hand. Valera was standing behind Petya trying—just as slowly—to stop him. Fortunately, he managed it. Ivan shook his head and pulled the pistol out of his pocket. The next moment the stool, thrown accurately by Petya, struck him. His pistol flew off into the corner, gave out a quiet plopping sound, and a substantial dent appeared in the ceiling. Plaster scattered down onto the floor.
“Making out like he’s a thief, the bloody front line worker,” said Petya to the confused and startled Valera, as he bent down for the pistol. “I did a year and a half inside, I know that tune. Now,” he turned towards Ivan, “you’re in for an epiphenomenon of dehumanization. An accordion across the power tool.” He reached out for the case.
V
“It depends on your pay,” Ivan said, pressing the crumpled handkerchief to the corner of his mouth, “and what kind of car it is. You’re wrong to think you live in the kingdom of darkness and we have the kingdom of light. We have trouble too. All sorts of homeless blacks. They spread AIDS.” Ivan couldn’t remember anything except a few snatches of the TV program with the gloomy title of “The Camera Looks Out Into the World,” but that was enough. Valera and Petya listened with their mouths wide open, and Ivan didn’t even want to get up from the table. But it was time to go.
“You tell them over there,” Valera said as Ivan was putting on his padded jacket, “that we’re not malicious. We want to live with a peaceful sky above our heads too. We want to work in peace and raise children. Okay?”
“Okay,” answered Ivan, hiding his pistol in the case with the transmitter and carefully clicking the nickel-plated locks closed. “I’ll make sure I tell them.”
“And tell them,” Petya said as he walked with him along the corridor with the identical rubber mats in front of each door, “that our secret isn’t in our bombs and our planes—it’s in us, ourselves.”
“I’ll tell them,” promised Ivan, “I’ve realized that.”
“Take the magazine,” Petya said in the doorway, “you can read it on the way.” Ivan took it. Then he embraced Petya and the subdued Valera in farewell and stepped out onto the staircase without looking back. The door clicked shut behind him. He walked down, stepped onto the dark street and took a deep breath of air that smelled of heavy fuel oil and damp planks. There was a crimson flash in the sky, and Ivan almost made a dash back to the entrance (“Could it possibly be?” was the thought that flashed through his mind), but then he realized it was only a fireworks display.
“Hoorah!” came the ragged cheer from people on the street. “Hoorah!”
“Hoorah!” cheered Ivan.
Another set of rockets exploded in the sky and again everything was lit up—yellow walls, yellow three-story houses, yellow streamers of either smoke or mist across the low shaggy-haired sky. Far, far away in the distance he could hear a sad, drawn-out mechanical howling—as though something huge, rusty, and oily was demanding attention from the people, or perhaps simply wishing them a happy holiday. Then everything turned green. Ivan strode off towards the station.
Prince of Gosplan
Loading...
The little figure runs along the corridor. It is drawn with great affection, perhaps a little too sentimentally. If you press the
The space through which the figure runs changes. Most of the time it’s no more than a plain stone passageway, but sometimes it turns into an incredibly beautiful gallery with a strip of oriental ornament running along the w
all and tall narrow windows. There are torches blazing on the walls and enemies with naked swords standing in the dead ends of side corridors and on the precarious bridges over deep shafts of stone—the little figure can fight with them if you press the
The final purpose is to reach the highest level, where the princess is waiting, but to do that you have to devote a lot of time to the game itself. In fact, to be successful, you have to forget that you’re pressing keys and actually become the little figure—only then will it acquire the degree of agility required to fence, jump through the snapping body-scissors in the narrow stone corridors, leap over the stone shafts and run over the collapsing flagstones, each of which can only support the weight of a body for seconds—although the figure has no body, let alone any weight, and neither, if you think about it, do the tumbling slabs of stone, no matter how convincing the sound might be when they fall.
Level 1
The prince was running along the stone ledge: he had to squeeze through under the iron portcullis before it dropped, because beyond it stood a jar with a slim neck, and he had almost no strength left at all. There were already two shafts with spikes behind him, and the leap down onto the floor strewn with stone fragments had cost him a serious effort as well. Sasha pressed
“Lapin!” said a repulsively familiar voice behind his back, and Sasha felt a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach, although there was no real reason for him to feel afraid.
“Yes, Boris Grigorievich?”
“Come into my office.”
Boris Grigorievich’s office was actually not an office at all, it was simply a section of the room separated off by several bookshelves and cupboards, and when Boris Grigorievich strode around his territory the bald dome of his head could be seen over the top of them, so that Sasha sometimes had the feeling that he was squatting down beside a billiard table and watching the movement of the only remaining ball over the top of the cushion. After lunch Boris Grigorievich usually dropped into one of the pockets, but he spent the golden hours of the morning bouncing around from cushion to cushion, with the part of the cue played by the telephone—every ring it gave made the ivory-colored hemisphere move faster above the paper-cluttered surface of the cupboards.
Sasha hated Boris Grigorievich with the calm, enduring hatred known only to Siamese cats who live with cruel masters, and Soviet engineers who read George Orwell. Sasha had read all of Orwell at college, when it was still forbidden, and every day since then he had found a multitude of reasons to smirk wryly and shake his head. And now, as he approached the passage between two cupboards, he gave a crooked smile at the thought of the conversation ahead. Boris Grigorievich was standing by the window and practicing the “swallow’s flight” blow, pausing at length in each of the intermediate positions. He wasn’t using a bamboo pole, as he had when he recently began studying Budokan, but a genuine samurai sword. Today he was wearing a “hunting costume” of green satin over a creased kimono of patterned sinobu fabric. When Sasha entered, he lovingly laid the sword on the windowsill, sat down on a straw mat and pointed to another mat beside it. Folding his legs underneath him with a struggle, Sasha sat down and fixed his gaze on the Honda poster showing a motorcyclist in tall leather boots who for more than a year had been riding the wall of death across the cupboard to the right of Boris Grigorievich’s straw mat. Boris Grigorievich placed his hand palm-down on the processor unit of his AT—it was the same as Sasha’s, except that it had an eighty megabyte hard disk—and closed his eyes, pondering how to begin the conversation.
“Have you read the latest issue of Arguments and Facts?” he asked after a minute or so.
“I don’t subscribe.”
“You should,” said Boris Grigorievich, picking up the folded sheets of newsprint from where they lay on the floor and shaking them back and forth, “it’s a fine newspaper. What I can’t understand at all is just what the communists are hoping for. Killed fifty million people and still they carry on with their mumbo jumbo. They can’t fool anyone any longer.”
“Uh-uh,” said Sasha.
“And look at this, about a thousand women in America pregnant by aliens. Plenty of them here too, but the KGB’s got them hidden away somewhere.”
“Just what is he after?” Sasha thought wearily.
Boris Grigorievich began thinking and his face darkened.
“You’re a strange lad, Sasha,” he said at last. “You’re always sullen, never make friends with anyone in the department. They’re people, you know, not just pieces of furniture. Yesterday you gave Lusya a real fright. She told me today: ‘I don’t care what you say, Boris Grigorievich, but I’m scared of being alone in the elevator with him.’”
“I’ve never been alone in the elevator with her,” said Sasha.
“And that’s exactly why she’s afraid. Take a ride with her, grab her by the cunt, have a bit of a laugh. Have you read Dale Carnegie?”
“What did I do to frighten her?” Sasha asked, trying to recall who Lusya was.
“Never mind Lusya, that’s not the point,” said Boris Grigorievich, gesturing impatiently. “You just need to behave like a normal human being, understand? All right, we’ll continue this conversation some other time, right now I’ve got an important question for you. How well do you know Abrams?”
“Fairly well.”
“How do you turn the turret in it?”
“First you press
“You sure? Let’s take a look.”
Sasha went over to the computer. Boris Grigorievich whispered something to himself as his fingers stumbled uncertainly over the keyboard while he loaded the game.
“That turns it right, and that turns it left,” said Sasha.
“So it does. I’d never have guessed in a hundred years.”
Boris Grigorievich picked up his phone and began dialing a number.
“Boris Emelianovich,” he purred, “we’ve worked it out. Press
Boris Grigorievich turned to Sasha, curved his lips into an imploring smile and without giving the slightest hint of offense, twirled his fingers in the direction of the exit. Sasha stood up and went out.
“Ha ha ha... On paper? Populous? I’ve never even heard of it. We’ll do it. We’ll do it. We’ll do it. Take care now.”
Level 2
Sasha always went out onto the dark staircase to smoke, to a window from which he could see a tall building and some ramshackle but beautiful earth terraces below it. When he had lit his cigarette, he usually stared for a long time at the skyscraper—his view of the star perched on its pinnacle was slightly from one side and the wreaths framing it made it look like a double headed eagle. As he looked at it, Sasha often imagined a different version of Russian history—or rather a different trajectory, leading to precisely the same point—with the construction of exactly the same tall building, but with a different symbol on its summit. But right now the sky looked particularly repulsive, and seemed even grayer than the building.
On the landing one floor below, two men dressed in
identical overalls of fine English wool were smoking: each of them had a gold wrench sticking out of his breast pocket. Listening to their conversation, Sasha realized that they were from the game Pipes. Sasha had seen the game, he’d even gone to install it on some deputy minister’s hard disk, but he didn’t like its total lack of romanticism, its superficiality of feeling, and especially the fact that up in the top left corner it had an image of a loathsome-looking plumber who began laughing every time one of the pipes burst. These two, however, seemed to be seriously involved.
“They won’t deliver under the old contracts,” complained the first set of overalls, “they want hard currency.”
“Try going back to the beginning of the stage,” answered the other set, “or simply reload.”
“I’ve tried that. Yegor even took a trip to the plant, three times he tried to get to see the director before he went down.”
“If he goes down, you have to press
The two sets of overalls looked up simultaneously at Sasha, glanced at each other, tossed their cigarette butts into the bucket, and disappeared off down the corridor.
“I wonder,” thought Sasha, “whether they’re just pretending to each other or they really find it interesting playing with those pipes?” He set off down the staircase. “My God, just what is it I’m hoping for?” he thought. “What will I be doing here a year from now? They may be very stupid, but they see everything—and they understand everything. And they never forgive anything. What a chameleon you have to be to work here.”
Suddenly the staircase under his feet shuddered, a heavy concrete block with four steps on it fell away from under his feet, and a second later smashed into the flight of steps a floor below, without causing the slightest harm to the two girls from the administration office who were standing at the precise point of its impact. The girls raised their pretty birdlike heads and looked at Sasha, who had just managed to save himself by grabbing the edge of the step that was still in place.
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 17