Snail on the Slope Page 12

"No, I mean it, one to the jaw."

  "Yes," Pepper said severely, "because here that sort of thing is out."

  "Let's go then," said Quentin, lying back in his seat.

  "Ace," said Stoyan. "Climb in. If we get stuck you can give us a hand."

  "I've got a new pair of pants on," objected Acey. "Better let me drive."

  Nobody answered, so he climbed into the back seat next to Quentin who moved up. Pepper got in next to Stoyan and they set off.

  The pups had already gone quite a way, but Stoyan, driving with great skill, keeping the offside wheels on the path and the nearside on the dusty moss, soon overtook them and crawled slowly behind carefully using the clutch to adjust his speed. "You'll burn the clutch out," said Acey. He turned to Quentin and began explaining that he'd had no ulterior motive, he had no motorbike anymore anyway and a man's a man and if he's normal always will be, forest or no, no matter whether ...

  "Have you had one in the jaw?" Quentin kept asking. "No, you just tell me, the truth now, have you ever had one on the jaw or not?" Quentin kept asking and interrupting Acey. "No," Acey would answer, "no, wait a minute, you hear me out first..."

  Pepper stroked his swollen finger and looked at the pups. The children of the forest. Or perhaps its servants. Or maybe its experiments. They were proceeding slowly and tirelessly one after the other in line ahead, as if flowing along the ground; they oozed across rotting tree stumps, crossed ruts, pools of stagnant water in the tall grass, through prickly bushes.

  The track kept disappearing, diving into evil-smelling mud, hiding itself under layers of tough gray mushrooms that crunched under the wheels, then again appearing, while the pups held their direction and stayed white, clean, smooth; not a blade of grass stuck to them, not a thorn wounded them, they were unstained by the sticky black mud. They oozed along with a kind of stupid unthinking confidence, as if along a road long-known and habitual. There were forty-three of them.

  I was dying to get here and now I've arrived, at least I'm seeing the forest from inside and I'm seeing nothing. I could have imagined all this sitting in my bare hostel room with its three empty bunks; late night insomnia, everything quiet all about, then right on midnight the piledriver starts thumping on the construction site. I could have thought it all up: mermaids, walking trees and these pups, turning into pathfinder Selivan - the most absurd things, the holiest. And everything there is in the Directorate I can imagine and bring to mind. I could have stayed at home and dreamed this all up, lying on my sofa listening to symphojazz or voices talking unfamiliar languages on the radio... But that doesn't mean a thing. To see and not understand is the same as making it up. I'm alive, I can see and I don't understand. I'm living in a world someone has thought up without bothering to tell me, or maybe even himself. A yearning for understanding - that's my sickness, thought Pepper suddenly, a yearning for understanding.

  He stuck his hand out of the window and held his aching finger against the cool car-body. The pups were paying the landrover no attention. They probably had no suspicion of its existence. They gave off a sharp unpleasant smell; their membrane now seemed transparent and it was as if wave-like shadows moved beneath.

  "Let's catch one," suggested Quentin. "It's simple enough, we'll wrap it in my jerkin and take it to the lab."

  "Not worth it," said Stoyan.

  "Why not?" Quentin asked. "We'll have to catch one sooner or later."

  "Doesn't seem right, somehow," Stoyan said. "In the first place, God help us, the thing'll die on us and I'll have to write a report for Hausbotcher."

  "We've had them boiled," Acey announced suddenly. "I didn't like the taste, but the boys said it was all right. Bit like rabbit, I can't touch rabbit, to me a cat and a rabbit's just the same; can't bear the stuff..."

  "I've noticed one thing," said Quentin. "The number of pups is always a simple number: thirteen, forty-three, forty-seven..."

  "Nonsense," objected Stoyan. "I've come across groups of six or twelve."

  "That's in the forest," said Quentin, "after that groups scatter in different directions. The cesspit always produces a simple number, you can check the log, I've put all my conclusions down."

  "Me and the boys caught one of the local girls once, what a laugh that was!"

  "Well all right, write an article then," said Stoyan.

  "1 already have," said Quentin. "That'll make fifteen..."

  "I've done seventeen," said Stoyan. "And one at the printers. Who's your co-author?"

  "I don't know yet," said Quentin. "Kirn recommends the manager, he says transport's the coming thing now, but Rita advises the warden."

  "Not him," said Stoyan.

  "Why?" asked Quentin.

  "Don't choose the warden," Stoyan repeated. "I'm not saying anything to you - just keep it in mind."

  "The warden used to dilute the yogurt with brake fluid," said Acey. "That was when he was the manager of the barbershop. So me and the boys slipped a handful of bedbugs into his room."

  "They say they're preparing a directive," said Stoyan. "Whoever's got less than fifteen articles to their name have to undergo treatment."

  "Oh Lord," said Quentin, "that's a bad business. I

  know what special treatment means, after one of them your hair stops growing and you have bad breath for a year..."

  Home, thought Pepper. Get home as soon as you can. Now there really is nothing for me here. Just then he saw that the pup formation had broken up. Pepper counted: thirty-two pups went straight ahead, while a column of eleven had turned off left and down, where a lake became suddenly visible between the trees - dark motionless water, quite near the landrover. Pepper glimpsed a low misty sky and the vague outline of the Directorate on the horizon. The eleven pups were heading confidently toward the water. Stoyan shut the engine off and everybody climbed out to watch the pups oozing over a twisted bough at the water's edge and plop heavily one after another into the lake. Oily circles rocked along the dark water.

  "They're going down," said Quentin in amazement. "They're drowning."

  Stoyan got his map and spread it out over the bonnet.

  "Right enough," he said. "This lake isn't marked. There's a village marked but no lake... Here it is written: 'Vill. Aborig. Seventeen point one one.' "

  "That's always the way," said Acey. "Who uses a map in this forest? In the first place all the maps are inaccurate and secondly, you don't need them here. Say there's a road here today, tomorrow they'll have barbed wire up and a watchtower. Or you'll find a dump all of a sudden."

  "I don't sort of feel like going on farther," said Stoyan, stretching himself. "Maybe we'll call it a day?"

  "Surely," said Quentin. "Pepper's still got his pay to collect. Back to the van."

  "A pair of binoculars would be handy," said Acey suddenly, cupping his eyes and avidly staring into the lake. "I reckon there's a woman in there bathing."

  Quentin halted.

  "Where?"

  "She's got nothing on," said Acey. "True as I'm standing here. Not a stitch."

  Quentin suddenly went pale and made a headlong rush for the van.

  "Where is it you see her?" asked Stoyan.

  "Over there at the far bank..."

  "There's nothing there," croaked Quentin. He was standing on the running-board and sweeping the far bank with his binoculars. His hands shook. "Damned bigmouth... Asking for another one... No, not a thing!" he repeated passing Stoyan the glasses.

  "What d'you mean, nothing?" said Acey. "I'm no four-eyes, I've got an eye like a water-level..."

  "Wait a minute, wait, don't grab them," said Stoyan. "There's manners, grabbing them out of my hand..."

  "There's nothing there," muttered Quentin. "He's pulling your leg. There's plenty of travelers' tales..."

  "I know what it is," said Acey. "It's a mermaid. I'm telling you."

  Pepper roused himself.

  "Give me the binoculars," he said quickly.

  "Nothing to see," said Stoyan, holding out the glasses.

/>   "Fine guy to believe, I must say," muttered Quentin, now calming down.

  "Honestly, there was," said Acey. "She must have dived. She'll be up in a minute..."

  Pepper focused the glasses. He didn't expect to see anything: that would have been too simple. And nothing was what he saw. The unruffled lake, a distant bank overgrown with forest and the silhouette of a rock above the forest's jagged skyline.

  "What was she like?" he asked.

  Acey began a detailed description of her, with much use of the hands. His narrative was succulent and full of fervor, but it wasn't at all what Pepper wanted.

  "Yes, naturally ..." said he, "yes ... yes."

  Perhaps she came up to welcome the pups, he thought as he bounced around in the back seat alongside a gloomy Quentin, gazing at the even movement of Acey's ears. Acey was chewing something. She came out of the forest thickets white, cold, confident, and stepped into the water, the water she knew so well, entered into the lake as I walk into a library, sank into the rippling green twilight and swam toward the pups. She met them straight away in the center of the lake, on the bottom, and led them off somewhere, for some reason, at someone's behest, and one more knot of forest events is tied. And perhaps miles away from here something will happen or start to happen; banks of the lilac fog that isn't fog will seethe between the trees, or another cesspit will start up in a peaceful clearing, or mottled aborigines who've just been sitting and watching an educational film and patiently listening to a lecture by Beatrice Vakh, earnestly hoarse, will all of a sudden get up and go off into the forest, never to return... And it will all be replete with profound significance, the profound significance that informs the movements of complicated machinery, and it will all be strange and, therefore, meaningless to us, at any rate for those of us who still can't get used to lack of meaning or accept it as the norm. He sensed the significance of each and every event, every phenomenon about him: that no batch of pups could number forty-two or forty-five and that the trunk of that tree there was overgrown with red moss and no other, that the sky was invisible along the path because of overhanging branches.

  The vehicle shook. Stoyan was driving extremely slowly and from some way off Pepper could see a leaning post and a sign with something written on it. The legend had been washed out by rain and faded, it was a very old notice on a very old, dirty-gray board, pinned to the pole with two huge rusty nails. "Here, two years ago, pathfinder Gustave was tragically drowned. Here his memorial will be set up." The landrover made its way around the pole, lurching from side to side.

  Whatever got into you, Gustave, Pepper thought. How did you manage to drown here? You were a tough guy no doubt, your head was shaved, your jaw was bristly and square, a gold tooth, tattooed from top to toe, your arms hung below your knees, you'd a finger missing on the right, bitten off in a drunken brawl. It wasn't your heart that sent you off to become a pathfinder, things just panned out that way, you served your time up on the cliff where the Directorate stands now and there was nowhere for you to run to except the forest. And you wrote no articles in the forest, you never even gave them a thought, you thought about other articles written before that and aimed at you. And you built a strategic road, laid concrete slabs and chopped down the forest far away on both sides so that eight-engined bombers could land here if need be. Could the forest put up with that? It drowned you in a dry place, but they'll put a monument up to you in ten years time and maybe give your name to some cafe. The cafe will be called "Gustave's" and driver Acey will drink yogurt there and stroke the rumpled girls from the local choir...

  Apparently Acey had two convictions, neither, for some reason, for what might be expected. The first time he'd landed up in a labor colony for stealing stationery from some concern, and the second time for offenses against the passport regulations. Stoyan there was clean. Doesn't drink yogurt, nothing. He loves Alevtina tenderly and purely, whom nobody ever loved tenderly and purely. When article number twenty came out, he would offer Alevtina his heart and hand and would be turned down, his articles notwithstanding, his broad shoulders and beautiful Roman nose notwithstanding, for Alevtina couldn't stand anybody fastidious, suspecting in him (not without reason) a rake of such refinement as to be beyond her comprehension. Stoyan lives in the forest whither, unlike Gustave, he came voluntarily. He never complains about anything although for him the forest is just a vast pile of material for articles, guaranteeing him against treatment...

  One might marvel endlessly at the fact that there were people able to get used to the forest, and yet such people were the overwhelming majority. At first they were attracted by the forest as a romantic or lucrative location, or a place where control was not over-strict, or a place of refuge. Then they got a bit afraid of it, and then they made the discovery that "it's just the same mess here as everywhere else," and that reconciled them to the strangeness of the forest, but nobody intended to live out his old age here. Quentin now, as rumor had it, only lived here because he feared to leave Rita unguarded, and Rita refused to go away from the forest at any price, though she never told anybody why... There, I've got around to Rita... Rita can go off into the forest and not come back for weeks. Rita bathes in forest lakes. Rita breaks all the rules and nobody dares to criticize. Rita writes no articles. Rita doesn't write anything, even letters. It's common knowledge that Quentin cries of a night and goes off to sleep with the canteen assistant if she's not busy with somebody else ... it's all over the biostation... Good god, they light up the club, plug in the record-player, drink yogurt; they drink a vast amount of yogurt and in the moonlight they hurl the bottles into the lake and see who gets the farthest. They dance, play forfeits and spin the bottle, cards and billiards, they swap women, and by day in their laboratories they pour the forest from one test tube to another, study the forest under a microscope, reckon it up on adding machines, while the forest stands all around them, looms above them, grows up through their bedrooms and in the stifling hours before the thunderstorm, wandering trees come crowding up to their windows, and they also, no doubt wonder what these people are, why they're here and why they exist at all...

  A good thing I'm getting out of here, he thought. I've been here, understood nothing, found nothing I wanted to find, but I know now that I never will understand anything, that there is a time for everything. There's nothing in common between the forest and me, the forest is no nearer to me than the Directorate is. Anyway, at least I'm not staying here to be covered in shame. I'm going away, I shall work and wait. I shall hope for the time to come when...

  The biostation yard was empty. There was no sign of the truck, and there was no line at the pay-out window. All there was was Pepper's suitcase standing on the porch that barred his way, his gray raincoat hung on the verandah rail. Pepper got out of the landrover and looked around in perplexity. Acey, arm in arm with Quentin was already heading for the canteen, which gave out a clink of cutlery and a smell of burning. Stoyan said: "Let's go and have supper, Peppy," and drove the vehicle into the garage. Pepper, to his horror, suddenly realized what all this meant: a howling record-player, senseless chatter, yogurt, another little glass, eh? And the same every evening, on and on for evening after...

  The pay-window rattled and an angry cashier stuck his head out: "Where've you been, Pepper? How long haye I got to wait? Get over here and sign up."

  Pepper approached the window on stiffened legs. "Right here - I'll put the total in," the cashier said. "No, no, not there, here. Why're your hands shaking? Here you are."

  He began counting out notes.

  "But where are the rest? asked Pepper.

  "Don't rush... The rest are in the envelope here."

  "No, I mean..."

  "What you mean doesn't affect anybody. I - canf change the procedure just for you. There's your salary, have you got it?"

  "I wanted to find out..."

  "I'm asking you, have you received your salary? Yes or no?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank the Lord. Now your bonus. Have yo
u received that?"

  "Yes."

  "That's it then. Allow me to shake your hand. I'm in a hurry. I have to be at the Directorate by seven."

  "I only wanted to ask," said Pepper hurriedly, "where all the rest of the people ... Kim, the truck ... they did promise to take me ... to the Mainland."

  "Can't do it to the Mainland, I have to be at the Directorate. Excuse me, I'm shutting the window now.

  "I won't take up much room," said Pepper.

  "That's not the point. You're not a child, you must realize, I'm a cashier. I have payrolls - what if anything happens to them? Take your elbow away."

  Pepper took his elbow away and the window slammed down. Through the murky thumb-printed glass, Pepper could make out the cashier collecting up his payrolls, screwing them up any how and stuffing them into his briefcase; then the office door opened, two massive guards came in and bound the cashier's hands, throwing a noose about his neck; one of them led the cashier off on the rope while the other took the briefcase and gazed around the room, catching sight of Pepper as he did so. For a while they stared at one another through the dirty glass, then very slowly and carefully, as if fearing to scare someone, the guard placed the briefcase on the chair and, without taking his eyes from Pepper, reached out for the rifle that was leaning against the wall. Pepper waited, cold and incredulous, as the guard took up the rifle, stumbled and went out, shutting the door behind him. The light was extinguished.

  Pepper then fell back from the window, ran on tiptoe to his suitcase, seized it and fled, anywhere, as far as might be from this place. He took cover behind the garage and watched the guard come out onto the porch, holding his rifle at the port, a glance left and right, then underfoot; he took Pepper's raincoat, weighed it in his hand, rummaged in the pockets and after another glance around, went off into the house. Pepper sat down on his suitcase. It was chilly and night was falling. Pepper sat pointlessly staring at the lighted windows, whitened for half their height. Beyond the window shadows moved; on the roof the latticed vane of the radar silently rotated. Crockery rattled, night creatures called in the forest. Then somewhere a searchlight flashed out a blue beam and into it from behind the corner of the building rolled a shovel truck, rumbling and leaping on the rutted road; followed by the searchlight, it reached the gates. In the scoop sat the guard with the rifle. He was smoking, muffled up against the wind; a thick fleecy rope was wrapped around his left wrist and led off through the half-opened window of the driver's cab.