Doomed City, Page 2

  He was expecting Donald to smile, at least. Donald was generally a cheerful individual, sociable—he never got downhearted. There was something of the combat-veteran-turned-student about him. But this time Donald only cleared his throat and said in a dull voice, “You can’t shovel out all the cesspits.”

  And Wang, scrabbling beside the can, reacted in a way that was really strange. He suddenly asked in a curious voice, “So what does it cost where you’re from?”

  “What does what cost?” asked Andrei, puzzled.

  “Shit. Is it expensive?”

  Andrei chuckled uncertainly. “Well, how can I put it . . . It depends whose it is.”

  “So you’ve got different kinds there then?” Wang asked in amazement. “It’s all the same where I’m from. So whose shit is most expensive where you’re from?”

  “Professors’,” Andrei replied immediately. He simply couldn’t resist it.

  “Ah!” Wang tipped another shovel-load into the can and nodded. “I get it. But out in the country there weren’t any professors, so we only had one price: five yuan a bucket. That’s in Szechuan. But in Kiangsi, for instance, prices ran up to seven or even eight yuan a bucket.”

  Andrei finally realized this was serious. He suddenly felt an urge to ask if it was true that when a Chinaman was invited to dinner, he was obliged to crap on his host’s vegetable plot afterward—but, of course, it felt too awkward to ask about that.

  “Only how things are now where I’m from, I don’t know,” Wang continued. “I wasn’t living out in the country at the end . . . But why is professors’ shit more expensive where you’re from?”

  “I was joking,” Andrei said guiltily. “No one even trades in that stuff where I’m from.”

  “Yes they do,” said Donald. “You don’t even know that, Andrei.”

  “And that’s yet another thing you do know,” Andrei snapped.

  Only a month ago he would have launched into a furious argument with Donald. It annoyed him immensely that again and again the American kept telling them things about Russia that Andrei didn’t even have a clue about. Back then, Andrei was sure that Donald was simply bluffing him or repeating Hearst’s spiteful tittle-tattle: “Take that garbage from Hearst and shove it!” he used to yell, shrugging it all off. But then that jerk Izya Katzman had appeared, and Andrei stopped arguing; he just snarled back. God only knew where they’d picked it all up from. And he explained his own helplessness by the fact that he’d come here from the year 1951, and these two were from ’67.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Donald said suddenly, getting up and moving toward the trash cans beside the driver’s cabin.

  Andrei shrugged and, in an effort to rid himself of the bad taste left by this conversation, put on his mittens and started shoveling up the stinking trash, helping Wang. Well, so I don’t know, he thought. It’s a big deal, shit. And what do you know about integral equations? Or Hubble’s constant, say? Everyone has something he doesn’t know . . .

  Wang was stuffing the final remains of the trash into the can when the neatly proportioned figure of police constable Kensi Ubukata appeared in the gateway from the street. “This way, please,” he said over his shoulder to someone, and saluted Andrei with two fingers. “Greetings, garbage collectors!”

  A girl stepped out of the darkness of the street into the circle of yellow light and stopped beside Kensi. She was very young, no more than about twenty, and really small, only up to the little policeman’s shoulder. She was wearing a coarse sweater with an extremely wide neck and a short, tight skirt. Thick lipstick made her lips stand out vividly against her pale, boyish face, and her long blonde hair reached down to her shoulders.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Kensi told her with a polite smile. “They’re only our garbage collectors. Perfectly harmless in a sober state . . . Wang,” he called. “This is Selma Nagel, a new girl. Orders are to put her in your building, in number 18. Is 18 free?”

  Wang walked over to him, removing his mittens on the way. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been free for a long time. Hello, Selma Nagel. I’m the caretaker—my name’s Wang. If you need anything, that’s the door to the caretaker’s lodge, you come here.”

  “Let me have the key,” Kensi said, and saluted again. “Come on, I’ll show you the way,” he said to the girl.

  “No need,” she said wearily. “I’ll find it myself.”

  “As you wish,” Kensi said, and saluted again. “Here is your suitcase.”

  The girl took the suitcase from Kensi and the key from Wang, tossed her head, and set off across the asphalt, clattering her heels and walking straight at Andrei.

  He stepped back to let her past. As she walked by, he caught a strong smell of perfume and some other kind of fragrance too. And he carried on gazing after her as she walked across the circle of yellow illumination. Her skirt was really short, just a bit longer than her sweater, her legs were bare and white—to Andrei they seemed to glow as she walked out from under the archway into the yard—and in that darkness all he could see were her white sweater and flickering white legs.

  Then a door creaked, screeched, and crashed, and after that Andrei mechanically took out his cigarettes again and lit up, imagining those delicate white legs walking up the stairs, step by step . . . smooth calves, dimples under the knees, enough to drive you crazy . . . He saw her climbing higher and higher, floor after floor, and stopping in front of the door of apartment 18, directly opposite apartment 16 . . . Dam-naa-tion, I ought to change the bedsheets at least; I haven’t changed them for three weeks, the pillowcase is as gray as a foot rag . . . But what was her face like? Well, I’ll be damned, I don’t remember anything about what her face looked like. All I remember are the legs.

  He suddenly realized that no one was saying anything, not even the married man Wang, and at that moment Kensi started speaking. “I have a first cousin once removed, Colonel Maki. A former colonel of the former imperial army. At first he was Mr. Oshima’s adjutant and he spent two years in Berlin. Then he was appointed our acting military attaché in Czechoslovakia, and he was there when the Germans entered Prague . . .”

  Wang nodded to Andrei. They lifted the can with a jerk and successfully shunted it onto the back of the truck.

  “. . . And then,” Kensi continued at a leisurely pace, lighting up a cigarette, “he fought for a while in China, somewhere in the south, I think it was, down Canton way. And then he commanded a division that landed on the Philippines, and he was one of the organizers of the famous ‘march of death,’ with five thousand American prisoners of war—sorry, Donald . . . And then he was sent to Manchuria and appointed head of the Sakhalin fortified region, where, as it happens, in order to preserve secrecy he herded eight thousand Chinese workers into a mine shaft and blew it up—sorry, Wang . . . And then he was taken prisoner by the Russians, and instead of hanging him or handing him over to the Chinese—which is the same thing—all they did was lock him up for ten years in a concentration camp . . .”

  While Kensi was telling them all this, Andrei had time to clamber up onto the back of the truck, help Donald line up the cans there, raise the sideboard and secure it, jump back down onto the ground, and give Donald a cigarette, and now the three of them were standing in front of Kensi and listening to him: Donald Cooper, long and stooped, in a faded boilersuit—a long face with folds beside the mouth and a sharp chin with a growth of sparse, gray stubble; and Wang, broad and stocky, almost neckless, in an old, neatly darned wadded jacket—a broad, brownish face, little snub nose, affable smile, dark eyes in the cracks of puffy eyelids—and Andrei was suddenly transfixed by a poignant joy at the thought that all these people from different countries, and even from different times, were all here together and all doing one thing of great importance, each at his own post.

  “. . . Now he’s an old man,” Kensi concluded. “And he claims that the best women he ever knew were Russian women. Emigrants in Harbin.” He stopped speaking, dropped his cigarette butt, and painstakingly g
round it to dust with the sole of his gleaming ankle boot.

  Andrei said, “What kind of Russian is she? ‘Selma’—and ‘Nagel’ too?”

  “Yes, she’s Swedish,” said Kensi. “But all the same. The story came to me by association.”

  “OK, let’s go,” Donald said, and climbed into the cabin.

  “Listen, Kensi,” said Andrei, taking hold of the cabin door. “Who were you before this?”

  “An inspector at the foundry, and before that, minister of communal—”

  “No, not here, back there.”

  “Aah, there? Back there I was literary editor for the journal Hayakawa.”

  Donald started the motor and the vintage truck began shaking and rattling, belching out thick clouds of blue smoke.

  “Your right sidelight isn’t working!” Kensi shouted.

  “It hasn’t worked in all the time we’ve been here,” Andrei responded.

  “Then get it fixed! If I see it again, I’ll fine you!”

  “They set you on to hound us . . .”

  “What? I can’t hear!”

  “I said, catch bandits, not drivers!” Andrei yelled, trying to shout over the clanging and clattering. “What’s our sidelight to you? When are they going to send all you spongers packing?”

  “Soon,” Kensi said. “Any time now—it won’t be more than a hundred years!”

  Andrei threatened Kensi with his fist, waved good-bye to Wang, and plumped into the seat beside Donald. The truck jerked forward, scraping one side along the wall of the archway, trundled out onto Main Street, and made a sharp turn to the right.

  Settling himself more comfortably, so that the spring protruding from the seat wasn’t pricking his backside, Andrei cast a sideways glance at Donald, who was sitting up straight, with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right on the gearshift; his hat was pushed forward over his eyes, his pointed chin was thrust out, and he was driving at top speed. He always drove like that, “at the legal speed limit,” never giving a thought to braking at the frequent potholes in the road, and at every one of those potholes the trash cans in the back bounced heavily, the rusted-through hood rattled, and no matter how hard Andrei tried to brace himself with his legs, he flew up in the air and fell back precisely onto the sharp point of that damned spring. Previously, however, all this had been accompanied by good-humored banter, but now Donald didn’t say anything, his thin lips were tightly compressed, and he didn’t look at Andrei at all, which made it seem like there was some kind of malicious premeditation in this routine jolting.

  “What’s wrong with you, Don?” Andrei asked eventually. “Got a toothache?”

  Donald twitched one shoulder briefly and didn’t answer.

  “Really, you haven’t been yourself these last few days. I can see it. Maybe I’ve unintentionally offended you somehow?”

  “Drop it, Andrei,” Donald said through his teeth. “Why does it have to be about you?’

  And again Andrei fancied that he heard some kind of ill will, even something offensive or insulting, in these words: How could a snotty kid like you offend me, a professor? But then Donald spoke again.

  “I meant it when I said you were lucky. You really are someone to be envied. All this just kind of washes right over you. Or passes straight through you. But it runs over me like a steamroller. I haven’t got a single unbroken bone left in me.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t understand a thing.”

  Donald said nothing, screwing up his lips.

  Andrei looked at him, glanced vacantly at the road ahead, squinted sideways at Donald again, scratched the back of his head, and said disconcertedly, “Word of honor, I don’t understand a thing. Everything seems to be going fine—”

  “That’s why I envy you,” Donald said harshly. “And that’s enough about this. Just don’t take any notice.”

  “So how am I supposed to do that?” said Andrei, seriously perturbed now. “How can I not take any notice? We’re all here together . . . You, me, the guys . . . friendship is a big word, of course, too big . . . well then, simply comrades . . . I, for instance, would tell you if there was something . . . After all, no one’s going to refuse to help, are they! Well, you tell me—if something happened to me and I asked you for help, would you refuse? You wouldn’t, would you, honestly?”

  Donald’s hand lifted off the gearshift and patted Andrei gently on the shoulder. Andrei didn’t say anything. His feelings were brimming over. Everything was fine again, everything was all right. Donald was all right. It was just a fit of the blues. A man can get the blues, can’t he? It was simply that his pride had reared its head. After all, the man was a professor of sociology, and here he was down with the trash cans, and before that he was a loader. Of course, it was unpleasant and galling for him, especially since he had no one to take these grievances to—no one had forced him to come here, and it was embarrassing to complain . . . It was easily said: Make a good job of anything you’re given to do . . . Well, all right. Enough of all this. He’d manage.

  The old truck was already trundling along over diabase rendered slippery by settled mist, and the buildings on both sides had become lower and more dilapidated, and the lines of streetlamps running along the street had become dimmer and sparser. Ahead of them these lines merged into a blurred, hazy blob. There wasn’t a single soul on the roadway or the sidewalks, and for some reason they didn’t even come across any caretakers; only at the corner of Seventeenth Street, in front of a squat, dumpy hotel best known by its title of “the Bedbug Cage,” was there a cart with a dejected horse, and someone sleeping in the cart, completely bundled up in tarpaulin. It was four o’clock in the morning, the time of the deepest sleep, and not a single window was glowing in the black facades.

  A vehicle stuck its nose out of a gateway on the left, up ahead of them. Donald flashed his lights at it and hurtled past, and the vehicle, another garbage truck, pulled out onto the road and tried to overtake them, but it had picked the wrong guys for that. There was no way it could compete with Donald—its headlights glinted in through the rear window for a moment and then it dropped back, hopelessly outrun. They overtook another garbage truck in the Burnt Districts, and just in time, because the cobblestones started immediately after the Burnt Districts, and Donald was obliged to reduce speed anyway so the old rust bucket wouldn’t fall apart.

  Here they met trucks already going the other way, already empty—they were coming back from the dump, no longer in any hurry to get anywhere. Then a shadowy figure detached itself from a streetlamp and walked out into the road, and Andrei slipped his hand under the seat and pulled out a heavy tire iron, but it turned out to be a policeman, who asked them to give him a lift to Cabbage Lane. Neither Andrei nor Donald knew where that was, and then the policeman, a beefy guy with big jowls and tangled locks of light-colored hair sticking out from under his uniform cap, said he would show them the way.

  He stood on the running board beside Andrei, holding on to the door frame, twisting his nose about discontendedly the whole way, as if he’d caught a smell of something, God only knew what—although he himself reeked of stale sweat, and Andrei remembered that this part of the city had already been disconnected from the water main.

  For a while they drove in silence, with the policeman whistling something from an operetta, and then, right out of the blue, he informed them that just today, at midnight, on the corner of Cabbage Lane and Second Left Street, they’d bumped off some poor devil and pulled out all his gold teeth.

  “You’re not doing your job,” Andrei told him angrily. Cases like this infuriated him, and the policeman’s tone of voice made Andrei feel like punching him in the neck: it was immediately obvious that he couldn’t care less about the murder, or the victim, or the killer.

  The policeman swung his broad face around quizzically and asked, “So you’ll teach me how to do my job, will you?”

  “Maybe it could be me,” said Andrei.

  The policeman screwed his eyes up
ill-naturedly, whistled, and said, “Teachers, teachers! Whichever way you spit—teachers everywhere. He stands there and teaches. He’s carting garbage already, but he’s still teaching.”

  “I’m not trying to teach you—” Andrei began, raising his voice, but the policeman wouldn’t let him speak.

  “I’ll get back to the station now,” he informed them calmly, “and I’ll call your garage, and tell them your right sidelight isn’t working. His sidelight isn’t working—got it?—and on top of that, he’s teaching the police how to do their job. Pipsqueak.”

  Donald suddenly burst into dry, grating laughter.

  The policeman gave a hoot of laughter too and said in a perfectly amicable voice, “It’s just me for forty buildings, OK? And they forbid us to carry guns. What do you want from us? They’ll start knifing you at home soon, never mind the back alleys.”

  “So what are you doing about it?” Andrei said, stunned. “You should protest, demand—”

  “We have ‘protested,’” the policeman echoed acidly. “We have ‘demanded’ . . .You’re new here, are you? Hey, boss,” he called to Donald. “Pull up. This is my stop.”

  He jumped down off the running board and, without looking back, waddled off toward a dark crack between the lopsided wooden houses, where a solitary streetlamp burned in the distance, with a little knot of people standing under it.

  “Honest to God, are they total idiots, or what?” Andrei said indignantly when the truck started moving again. “How can they do that—the city’s full of riffraff, and the police are unarmed! It’s absolutely crazy. Kensi’s got a holster on his hip, what does he carry in it, cigarettes?”

  “Sandwiches,” said Donald. “‘Due to an increase in the numbers of cases of criminals attacking police officers in order to seize their weapons . . .’ and so forth.”