The Snail on the Slope Page 19

  He was watching her go, waving feebly, nodding, agreeing, and constantly trying to smile. Farewell, Nava, he thought. Farewell. They disappeared from sight, and only the reeds remained, but he could hear Nava’s voice, then she stopped talking, there was a splash, and all was silent. He swallowed the lump in his throat and asked the pregnant woman, “What will you do with her?”

  She was still carefully examining him. “What will we do with her?” she repeated pensively. “That’s none of your concern, goat, what we’ll do with her. She’s no longer going to need a husband, anyway. Or a father . . . But what should we do with you? After all, you’re from the White Cliffs—we can’t just let you go.”

  “What do you want?” Candide asked.

  “What do we want . . . Well, we definitely don’t want husbands.” She caught Candide’s eye and laughed contemptuously. “We don’t, we don’t, don’t worry . . . For once in your life, try not to be a goat. Try to imagine a world without goats . . .” She spoke without thinking—or, rather, she was thinking about something else. “What could you be good for? . . . Tell me, goat, what can you do?”

  Something lurked behind all of her words, behind her tone, behind her disdain and her cold imperiousness, something frightening and disagreeable, but it was hard to pinpoint—and for some reason, Candide was reminded of the square black door and of Karl with the two women, who had been similarly cold and imperious.

  “Did you hear me?” asked the pregnant woman. “What can you do?”

  “I can’t do anything,” Candide said dully.

  “Maybe you know how to command?”

  “I knew how to once,” Candide said. Go to hell, he thought. Leave me alone. I’m asking you how to get to the White Cliffs, and you won’t leave me alone . . . He suddenly realized that he was afraid of her, or he would have left a long time ago. She was master here, and he was the pathetic, dirty, stupid goat.

  “You knew how to once . . .” she repeated. “Tell this tree to lie down!”

  Candide looked at the tree. It was a big, thick tree with a lush crown of leaves and a shaggy trunk. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “All right,” she said. “Then kill this tree . . . You can’t do that either? Do you even know how to make a living thing dead?”

  “To kill it?”

  “Not necessarily kill it. Even an armeater can kill things. I mean to make a living thing dead. To force a living thing to be dead. Do you know how?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Candide.

  “You don’t understand . . . What do you do at those White Cliffs of yours, if you don’t even understand that much? You don’t know how to make dead things alive either?”

  “I don’t.”

  “So what do you know how to do? What were you doing at the White Cliffs, before you fell into the forest? Or did you just stuff yourself and desecrate women?”

  “I studied the forest,” said Candide.

  She looked at him sternly. “Don’t you dare lie to me. A single person can’t study the forest—it would be like studying the sun. If you don’t want to tell the truth, just say so.”

  “I did study the forest,” said Candide. “I studied . . .” He hesitated. “I studied the smallest creatures in the forest. The ones that can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

  “You’re lying again,” the woman said patiently. “It is impossible to study things that can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

  “It is possible,” said Candide. “You just need . . .” He hesitated again. Microscopes . . . Lenses . . . Instruments . . . This couldn’t be communicated. This couldn’t be translated. “If you take a drop of water,” he said, “then, if you have the right objects, you can see thousands of tiny creatures in it.”

  “You don’t need any objects for that,” said the woman. “I see you’ve sunk into depravity with your dead things at your White Cliffs. You’re degenerating. I’ve long since noticed that you’ve lost the ability to see the things in the forest that anyone else can see, even dirty men . . . Wait, are you talking about tiny creatures, or the tiniest creatures? Maybe you’re talking about the builders?”

  “Maybe,” Candide said. “I don’t understand you. I’m talking about the tiny creatures that can make people sick, but that can also heal them, that help make food, and that are present everywhere in great number . . . I was trying to figure out how the ones in the forest are made, and what they are like, and what they can do . . .”

  “And the ones at the White Cliffs are different, right?” the woman said sarcastically. “But OK, I now understand what it is you do there. You have no power over the builders, of course. Any village idiot can do more than you . . . So what in the world should I do with you? You did come here of your own accord.”

  “I’ll go,” Candide said wearily. “I’ll go, good-bye.”

  “No, wait . . . Stop, I tell you!” she shouted, and Candide felt red-hot pincers gripping his elbows from behind. He struggled, but it was pointless. The woman was thinking out loud: “After all, he came here of his own accord. Such things have been known to happen. If I let him go, he’ll go back to his village and become completely useless . . . Catching them is pointless . . . But when they come of their own accord . . . You know what I’ll do with you?” she said. “I’ll give you to the Instructresses for night labors. After all, we’ve had some successful cases . . . Take him to the Instructresses, take him away!” She waved her hand and slowly waddled into the reeds.

  And then Candide felt himself being turned onto the path. His elbows had gone numb, and it seemed to him as if they must have gotten charred. He struggled as hard as he could, and the vise tightened. He didn’t understand what was going to happen to him, or where he was going to be taken, or who the Instructresses could be, or what these night labors were, but he was reminded of his two most terrifying impressions: the ghost of Karl in the middle of a wailing crowd, and the armeater being twisted into a colorful knot. He managed to kick the deadling, striking backward, blindly and desperately, knowing that he wouldn’t get away with it twice. His foot sank into something soft and hot, then the deadling snorted and loosened its grip. Candide fell face-first into the grass, jumped up, turned around, and screamed—the deadling was already coming straight at him, its impossibly long arms spread wide. He had nothing at hand—not grasskiller, not ferment, not even a stick or a rock. The warm, marshy soil was sliding apart beneath his feet. Then he remembered something and stuck a hand under his shirt, and when the deadling hung over him, he hit it between the eyes with the scalpel, squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and, bringing his whole weight to bear, pulled the blade all the way down to the ground and fell again.

  He was lying prone, his cheek pressed against the grass, watching as the deadling stood there swaying, slowly opening like a suitcase along the entire length of its orange body. Then it stumbled and fell backward, flooding everything around it with a thick white liquid, twitched several times, and went still. Then Candide got up and trudged away. Along the path. As far as possible from this place. He could vaguely recall that he wanted to wait here for someone, that he wanted to find something out, that he was planning to do something. But none of that mattered now. What mattered was to get as far as possible from here, although he realized that there would never be any getting away. Not for him, and not for many, many, many others.

  9.

  PERETZ

  Peretz was woken up by discomfort, melancholy, and a weight on his mind and pressure on all his sensory organs that at first seemed unbearable. His discomfort was so acute that it felt like pain, and he gave an involuntary groan as he slowly regained consciousness.

  The weight on his mind turned out to be despair and frustration, because the truck wasn’t going to the Mainland, it was again not going to the Mainland—it wasn’t going anywhere at all. It was standing still with its engine off, cold and dead, its doors open wide. The windshield was covered in trembling water drops, which kept flowing together and streaming down in cold rivule
ts. The night behind the glass was illuminated by blinding flashes of headlights and searchlights, and he couldn’t see anything but these endless, agonizing bursts of light. Nor could he hear anything, which at first made him think that he had gone deaf, and only later did he realize that a deep, polyphonic blare of sirens was exerting a uniform pressure on his eardrums. He started throwing himself around the cab, bumping painfully against levers, ledges, and that damn suitcase; he tried to wipe the glass; he leaned out one door and then the other—but he simply couldn’t figure out where he was, what this place was, and what this all meant. We’re at war, he thought. My God, we must be at war! . . . The searchlights kept shining into his eyes with malicious delight, and he couldn’t see anything except some strange big building, all of whose windows kept lighting up then going dark at the same time. And he also saw lots and lots of large lilac splotches.

  An enormous voice suddenly said calmly, as if it were completely quiet: “Attention, attention. All employees must stay in one place by statute six seventy-five dot Pegasus omicron three oh two, directive eight thirteen, for the ceremonial reception of the padishah without a special retinue, shoe size fifty-five. Let me repeat. Attention, attention. All employees . . .” The searchlight beams stopped darting around, and Peretz finally managed to make out the familiar arch with the word WELCOME, the dark villas alongside the main street of the Administration, and the people in nightclothes standing in front of the villas, holding kerosene lamps. Then he saw a line of people running nearby, their black cloaks waving behind them as they ran. They were taking up the entire length of the street, stretching some strange pale object across it, and upon examination, Peretz realized that this object was either a fishing or a volleyball net. Then a strained voice screeched into his ear, “What is this truck doing here? Why did you stop there?” He recoiled and saw an engineer wearing a white cardboard mask standing right by his side, with “Libidovich” written on his forehead in indelible pencil, and this engineer clambered right over him, stepping on him with his dirty boots, shoving him in the face with his elbow, grunting and stinking of sweat; he fell into the driver’s seat, fumbled for the ignition key, didn’t find it, gave a hysterical squeal, and rolled out of the cab through the driver’s door. Then all the streetlights went on and it became as light as day, but the people in nightclothes kept standing by the doors of their villas with their kerosene lamps, and everyone was holding a butterfly net, and they were rhythmically waving these nets, as if chasing something invisible away from their doors. Four gloomy black cars, resembling windowless buses, drove past the truck going the opposite way, with some strange mesh blades rotating on their roofs. Then an ancient armored vehicle emerged from an alley and followed close behind them, its rusty turret spinning with a high-pitched whine, the thin barrel of its machine gun moving up and down. The armored vehicle barely managed to squeeze by the truck, and as it did so, a man in coarse calico nightclothes with drawstrings dangling stuck out his head and shouted irritably at Peretz, “What are you doing, pal? Keep going, you’re blocking the way!” Then Peretz put his head on his hands and closed his eyes.

  I’ll never manage to get out of here, he thought dully. No one needs me here, I’m of absolutely no use, but they won’t let me out, even if they have to start a war or stage a flood . . .

  “Papers, please,” said an old man’s slow, nasal voice, and someone tapped Peretz on the shoulder.

  “What?” said Peretz.

  “Your documents. Are they ready?” It was an old man in an oilskin raincoat, with an old Berdan rifle slung across his chest on a peeling metal chain.

  “What papers? What documents? Why?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Peretz!” said the old man. “Why aren’t you complying with the statute? You should have your documents in hand and ready for inspection, like in a museum.”

  Peretz handed over his identification.

  The old man, his elbows resting on the rifle, carefully examined the official seals, checked Peretz’s face against the photograph, and said, “Looks like you’ve lost weight, Herr Peretz. Your face looks gaunt. Must be working too hard . . .” He returned the identification.

  “What’s going on?” asked Peretz.

  “Exactly what should be going on,” the old man replied, suddenly growing stern. “It’s statute six hundred seventy-five dot Pegasus. That means an escape.”

  “What escaped? From where?”

  “Everything is exactly as described in the statute,” said the old man, starting to go down the steps. “There’s going to be an explosion any moment now, so you should protect your ears—sit with your mouth open.”

  “All right,” said Peretz. “Thank you.”

  “Why are you slinking around here, you old geezer?” Truck driver Waldemar’s mean voice came from below. “I’ll show you documents! Here, take a good look! Had enough yet? Now beat it.”

  Peretz heard shouting and a clatter of feet, then some people ran past, lugging a cement mixer. Truck driver Waldemar, disheveled, bristling, and with his teeth bared, clambered into the cab. Muttering curses under his breath, he started the engine and loudly slammed the door. The truck took off and sped down the street, going past the people in nightclothes waving their nets. He’s going to the garage, thought Peretz. Oh, whatever. But I refuse to touch that suitcase ever again. I won’t drag that damn thing around anymore. He prodded it spitefully with the heel of his foot. The vehicle made a sharp turn off the main street, crashed into a barricade constructed out of empty barrels and horse carts, smashed it to pieces, and sped on. For a while, the splintered front of a horse-drawn carriage bounced around on the radiator of the truck, then it tumbled off, crunching beneath the wheels. The truck was now flying through narrow alleys. Waldemar, looking grimly determined, an extinguished cigarette stuck to his lower lip, was spinning the enormous wheel with both hands, putting his whole body into it. No, he’s not going to the garage. And he’s not going to a workshop. And he’s not going to the Mainland. The alleys were dark and empty. Only once did they see someone: cardboard masks with writing on them and splayed-out fingers flashed briefly in the headlights, then everything disappeared again.

  “Me and my brilliant ideas,” said Waldemar. “I was gonna make a beeline to the Mainland, then I saw that you were asleep, thought I’d drop by the garage, get a game of chess in . . . I’d just found Achilles the locksmith, we grabbed some buttermilk, took a few swigs, set up the chessboard . . . I’d opened with Queen’s Gambit, he accepted, all was well . . . I played e4, he played c6. . . . . I told him, you better start praying. And then all hell broke loose . . . Signor Peretz, do you happen to have a cigarette?”

  Peretz passed him a cigarette. “What escaped?” he asked. “And where are we going?”

  “It’s the usual sort of nonsense,” said Waldemar, lighting the cigarette. “It happens every year. One of the engineers’ machines has run away. And now everyone’s been ordered to catch it. There they are, catching it . . .”

  They were now out of the residential area. People were wandering over the empty, moonlit wasteland. It looked like they were playing blindman’s buff—they were walking around with their knees half bent and their arms spread wide. Everyone was blindfolded. One of them ran right into a post at full speed, and he probably cried out in pain, because all the rest immediately stopped and started cautiously turning their heads back and forth.

  “Every year we have bullshit like this,” Waldemar was saying. “They have light sensors, and sound detectors, and electronics, and those damn parasite guards on each corner—and for all that, every year some machine manages to make a break for it. And then they tell you, drop everything you’re doing and go look for it. And who the hell wants to look for it? Who the hell wants to go near it, I ask? Because if you see it, even out of the corner out of your eye—you’re screwed. Either they’ll force you to become an engineer, or they’ll send you away to pickle mushrooms at some remote forest base, so you don’t, God forbid, spill the beans. S
o folks do their best to wiggle out of it. Some wear blindfolds so they can’t see, others have other tricks up their sleeves . . . And the smartest ones just run around and make a racket. They’ll ask for documents, they’ll search someone, or they’ll just climb onto a roof and yell their heads off. That way, it looks like they are keeping busy, but there’s no risk.”

  “Are we trying to catch it, too?” asked Peretz.

  “Of course. Everyone’s trying to catch it, and so are we. According to the statute, if the escaped mechanism isn’t found within six hours, it will be detonated remotely. So that everything stays under wraps. Or it might get in the wrong hands. Did you see the hubbub in the Administration? In six hours, that’ll seem like the quiet of a monastery. After all, no one knows what hole this machine may have crawled into. For all you know, it’s in your pocket. And it’s loaded with powerful explosives—they aren’t taking any chances . . . Last year, the machine turned out to be in the bathhouse, and the bathhouse was crammed full of people trying to save their hides. They figured, it’s damp, it’s out of the way . . . I was there myself. No way is it in the bathhouse, I thought . . . And there I went, sailing right out the window, nice and smooth, like riding a wave. Next thing I know, I’m in a snowbank, with burning beams flying overhead . . .”

  They were now driving down a broken-down white road across a plain covered in scraggy grass, illuminated by the weak light of the moon. On their left, in the direction of the Administration, the lights were again frantically rushing to and fro.

  “I just don’t understand,” said Peretz, “how we’re supposed to catch it when we don’t even know what it looks like . . . We don’t know whether it’s big or small, whether it’s light or dark . . .”