Doomed City Read online

  Andrei ruminated for a while, bracing himself like grim death with his feet to avoid being thrown up off the seat. It was almost the end of the cobblestones already.

  “I think it’s incredibly stupid,” he said eventually. “How about you?”

  “I think so too,” Donald responded, lighting up awkwardly with one hand.

  “And you talk about it so calmly?”

  “I’ve done all my worrying,” said Donald. “It’s a very old directive; you weren’t even here yet.”

  Andrei scratched the back of his head and frowned. Well, dammit, maybe there was some sense in this directive. When all was said and done, a solitary policeman really was tempting bait for those creeps. If they took away the guns, then of course they had to take them away from everyone. And, of course, the problem wasn’t that idiotic directive but the fact that there weren’t very many police officers, and they didn’t carry out very many raids—but they ought to set up one grand raid and sweep all this filth away at a single stroke! Get the local people involved. Me, for instance, I’d be happy to go . . . Donald would go, of course . . . I’ll have to write to the mayor.

  Then his thoughts suddenly took a new turn. “Listen, Don,” he said. “You’re a sociologist. Of course, I don’t reckon sociology is any kind of science at all—I’ve told you that already—it’s got absolutely no method. But, of course, you know a lot, a lot more than I do. So you explain to me where all this dross in our city comes from. How did they get here—the murderers, the rapists, the crooks? Didn’t the Mentors realize who they were inviting here?”

  “They realized, probably,” Donald replied indifferently, shooting straight over a terrifying pit filled with black water without even pausing.

  “But why then . . . ?”

  “People aren’t born thieves. They become thieves. And then, as everyone knows, ‘How can we tell what the Experiment requires? The Experiment is the Experiment . . .’” Donald paused for a moment. “Soccer is soccer: a round ball, a square pitch, and may the best team win.”

  The streetlamps came to an end and the residential area of the city was left behind. Now the battered and broken road was flanked on both sides by abandoned ruins—the remnants of incongruous colonnades that had slumped into shoddy foundations; walls propped up by girders, with gaping holes instead of windows; tall grass; stacks of rotting timber; thickets of nettles and thistles; stunted little trees, half choked by creepers, standing among heaps of blackened bricks. And then up ahead a hazy glow appeared again. Donald turned to the right, carefully steered past an oncoming empty truck, spun his wheels for a while in deep ruts choked with mud, and finally braked to a halt a hair’s breadth away from the red taillights of the last garbage truck in the line. He killed the engine and looked at his watch. It was about half past four.

  “We’ll be standing here for a good hour.” Andrei said cheerfully. “Let’s go and see who’s up in front of us.”

  Another truck drove up from behind and stopped. “Go on your own,” said Donald, leaning back in his seat and pulling the brim of his hat down over his face.

  Then Andrei also leaned back, adjusted the spring underneath him, and lit a cigarette. Up ahead, unloading was proceeding at full tilt—trash can lids clattered, the tallyman’s high voice shouted: “. . . eight . . . ten . . . ,” a thousand-candle-power lamp under a flat tin plate swayed on its pole. Then suddenly voices from several different throats started yelling at once: “Where are you going? Fuck it!”; “Pull back!”; “You’re the blind asshole here!”; “You looking for a smack in the mouth?” There were massive heaps of garbage, compacted into a dense mass, looming up on the left and the right, and a ghastly smell of rotten food wafted on the night breeze.

  A familiar voice suddenly spoke right in his ear. “Cheers, shit shifters! How’s the Great Experiment going?” It was Izya Katzman, life size and in person—disheveled, fat, grubby, and, as always, offensively cheerful. “Have you heard? There’s a scheme for a final solution to the problem of crime. They’re abolishing the police! To replace them they’re going to let the crazies out on the streets at night. It’s the end for the bandits and the hooligans—now only loonies will go outside at nighttime!”

  “Cretinous,” Andrei said frostily.

  “Cretinous?” Izya stood on the running board and stuck his head into the cabin. “On the contrary! Most ingenious! No additional expenditure. Returning the insane to their permanent places of residence is the responsibility of the caretakers—”

  “For which the caretakers are issued supplementary rations in the form of one liter of vodka,” Andrei butted in, which sent Izya into inexplicable raptures: he started giggling, making strange, guttural sounds, spraying saliva, and washing his hands with air.

  Donald suddenly swore in a hollow voice, swung open his door, jumped down, and disappeared into the darkness. Izya immediately stopped giggling and asked uneasily, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Andrei said morosely. “Probably you made him want to puke . . . But actually, he’s been that way for a few days already.”

  “Really?” Izya looked over the top of the cabin in the direction that Donald had gone. “A shame. He’s a good man. Only really badly maladapted.”

  “So who’s well adapted?”

  “I’m well adapted. You’re well adapted. Wang’s well adapted . . . Donald’s been getting indignant with everything just lately: Why do we have to stand in line to dump garbage? Why the hell is there a tallyman here? What’s he tallying?”

  “Well, he’s right to feel outraged,” said Andrei. “It really is kind of cretinous.”

  “But you don’t get all steamed up about it, do you?” Izya objected. “You realize perfectly well that the tallyman isn’t his own master. They’ve put him there to tally, so he tallies. And since he can’t keep up with his tallying, as you already know, a line forms. And a line . . . is a line . . .” Izya started gurgling and spraying again. “Of course, if Donald was in charge, he’d lay a good road here, with exit ramps for dumping garbage, and he’d transfer that great, muscly hulk of a tallyman to the police, to catch bandits. Or to the front line, to the farmers—”

  “So?” Andrei asked impatiently

  “What do you mean, ‘So?’ Donald isn’t the boss, is he?”

  “So why don’t the bosses do it?”

  “Why should they?” Izya exclaimed joyfully. “Think about it! Does the garbage get removed? It does. Does the amount removed get tallied? It does. Systematically? Oh yes. At the end of the month, a report will be presented: this month this many more cans of crap were removed than last month. The minister’s happy, the mayor’s happy, everyone’s happy, and if Donald’s not happy, well, no one forced him to come here—he’s a volunteer!”

  The truck in front of them belched out a cloud of blue smoke and moved forward about fifteen meters. Andrei hastily sat behind the wheel and glanced out. Donald was nowhere to be seen. Then he cautiously started up the engine and advanced raggedly for the same distance, with the engine cutting out three times on the way. Izya walked alongside, shying away in alarm when the truck started shuddering. Then he started telling Andrei some story about the Bible, but Andrei didn’t really listen—he was soaking wet after all the strain he’d just been through.

  Under the bright lamp they were still clanging garbage cans and the air was thick with obscenities. Something struck the roof of the cabin and bounced off, but Andrei took no notice. Oscar Heidemann walked up to them from behind, with his partner, a black man from Haiti, and asked for a cigarette. Almost invisible in the darkness, the Haitian, whose name was Silva, grinned with his white teeth.

  Izya launched into a conversation with them, and for some reason he called Silva a “Tonton Macoute” and questioned Oscar about someone named Thor Heyerdahl. Silva pulled strange faces, made his fingers into eyeglasses, and pretended to fire a burst from an automatic rifle. Izya clutched at his stomach and pretended to be slain on the spot. Andrei didn’t und
erstand a thing, and apparently neither did Oscar; very soon it became clear that he’d been confusing Haiti with Tahiti.

  Something skidded across the roof again, and suddenly a massive lump of agglutinated garbage smashed into the hood, shattering into pieces.

  “Hey!” Oscar shouted into the darkness. “Stop that!”

  Up ahead twenty throats started yelling again, and the intensity of the invective suddenly rose to a stratospheric level. Something was going on. Izya gave a plaintive squeal, clutched at his stomach, and doubled over—this time for real. Andrei opened the door and stuck his head out, and immediately took a hit on it from an empty tin can—it didn’t hurt, but it was very insulting—while Silva ducked down and slipped into the darkness. Andrei gazed around, protecting his head and face.

  He couldn’t see anything. A hail of rusty cans, pieces of rotten wood, old bones, and even fragments of bricks was showering down from behind the heaps of garbage on the left. He heard a jangle of breaking glass. A wild bellow of outrage rose up over the column of trucks. “What are those bastards doing over there?” voices yelled, almost in chorus. Engines roared as they started up and headlamps flared. Some trucks started jerking fitfully backward and forward; evidently the drivers were trying to turn them so as to light up the crests of garbage from which whole bricks and empty bottles were now flying down. A few more men, huddled over like Silva, dashed into the darkness.

  Andrei noticed in passing that Izya had crouched down beside the back of the truck with a tearstained face and was feeling at his stomach. Then Andrei ducked back into the cabin, grabbed the tire iron from under the seat, and leaped out again. Smash their heads in, the bastards! He could see about a dozen garbage collectors down on all fours, clinging on with their hands as they clambered up the slope in a frenzy. One of the drivers managed to set his truck crossways to the line after all, and the beams of his headlamps lit up a ragged ridge, bristling with fragments of old furniture, frizzy with old clothes and scraps of paper, and glittering with broken glass, and above the ridge the scoop bucket of an excavator, raised high in the air, stood out against the black sky. Something was moving on the scoop bucket, something large and gray, with a silvery sheen. Andrei froze, staring at it, and at that very moment a despairing howl rang out above the babble of voices.

  “It’s devils! Devils! Run for your life!”

  Immediately men came pouring down the slope, tumbling over and over, on hands and knees, head over heels, raising clouds of dust, in a swirling vortex of torn clothes and tatters of paper. One man, clutching his head in his hands and pulling his elbows in tight to protect it, hurtled past Andrei, still squealing in panic, slipped in a rut, fell, got up again, and ran on, going flat out in the direction of the City. Another, breathing hoarsely, squeezed in between the radiator of Andrei’s truck and the back of the one in front, got stuck there, snagged on something, and started straining to break free, also yelling in a strange voice. Suddenly it turned quieter, with only the engines growling, and then, as sharp as blows from a whiplash, came the crack of shots. Up there on the ridge, in the bluish light of the headlamps, Andrei saw a tall, lean man, standing with his back to the trucks and holding a pistol in both hands, firing again and again at something in the darkness behind the ridge.

  He fired five or six times in the total silence, and then from out of the darkness came the inhuman howling of a thousand voices, a baleful, mournful caterwauling, as if twenty thousand March tomcats had all started wailing into megaphones at the same time, and the lean man backed away, lost his footing, flapped his arms awkwardly, and slid down the slope on his back. Andrei also shrank away in anticipation of something absolutely appalling, and he saw the ridge abruptly stir into motion.

  Suddenly the ridge was swarming with unbelievable silvery-gray, monstrously ugly ghosts, with thousands of blood-red, glittering eyes, and millions of damp fangs flashing in savage grins, and a whole forest of impossibly long, shaggy arms waving in the air. In the light of the headlamps, the dust rose up over them in a dense wall, and a solid deluge of broken bricks, rocks, bottles, and lumps of filth poured down on the column.

  This was too much for Andrei. He ducked into the cabin, huddled into the far corner, and held the tire iron out in front of himself, frozen, as if this were a nightmare. He was totally dazed, and when a dark body obscured the open door, he yelled out, without even hearing his own voice, and started jabbing the iron bar into the soft, terrifying thing that resisted and came creeping toward him, and he kept on jabbing until Izya’s plaintive howl—“It’s me, you idiot!”—brought him to his senses. And then Izya climbed into the cabin, slammed the door behind him, and announced in a surprisingly calm voice, “D’you know what they are? They’re monkeys. What bastards!”

  Andrei didn’t understand him at first, then he understood but didn’t believe him. “Is that right?” he said, stepping onto the running board and glancing around.

  Right: they were monkeys. Very large, very hairy, very fierce to look at, but not devils and not ghosts, only monkeys. Andrei felt a hot flush of shame and relief, and at the same moment something solid and heavy smashed into his ear so hard that he smashed his other ear against the roof of the cabin.

  “Everyone into the trucks!” an imperious voice roared somewhere up ahead. “Stop panicking! They’re baboons! Nothing to be afraid of! Get in the trucks and reverse!”

  There was sheer pandemonium in the column: mufflers popping, headlamps flaring up and going out, engines roaring unmercifully, clouds of gray-blue smoke swirling up toward the starless sky. A face flooded with something black and gleaming suddenly dove out of the darkness, hands seized Andrei by the shoulders, shook him like a puppy, and shoved him sideways into the cabin, and immediately the truck in front reversed and smashed into their radiator with a crunch, and the truck behind jerked forward and struck theirs like a tambourine, shifting the trash cans and setting them rattling, and Izya tugged on his shoulder and started hassling him: “Can you drive or can’t you? Andrei? Can you?” From out of the bluish smoke came a bloodcurdling howl of despair: “They’re killing me! Save me!” and the imperious voice kept roaring—“Stop panicking! The truck at the back, reverse! Move it!”—and from above, from the left, from the right, hard objects came raining down, clanking across the hood, smashing into the windscreen, and setting it jangling, and horns incessantly honked and hooted, and the abominable shrieking and howling kept getting louder and louder.

  Izya suddenly said, “Well, I’ll be going . . .” and, covering his head with his arms beforehand, he climbed out. He was almost run over by a truck hurtling in the direction of the City—Andrei caught a glimpse of the tallyman’s contorted face among the trashcans. Then Izya disappeared, and Donald appeared without his hat, scraped and scuffed, all covered in mud, flung a pistol down on the seat, sat behind the steering wheel, started up the engine, stuck his head out of the cabin, and started reversing.

  Apparently some kind of order had been established after all: the howls of panic faded away, engines roared in unison, and the entire column edged backward little by little. Even the hail of rocks and bottles seemed to have died down a little. The baboons jumped up and down and strutted about on the ridge of garbage but didn’t come down—they just yelled from up there, with their dogs’ mouths gaping, and derisively turned their buttocks, gleaming in the light of the headlamps, toward the column of trucks.

  The truck bowled along faster and faster, spun its wheels again in a mud-filled pothole, shot out onto the road and swung around. Donald changed gears with a grating sound, stepped on the gas, slammed the door, and flung himself back in the seat. Ahead of them, skipping about in the gloom, were the red taillights of trucks headed for the City, going flat out.

  We’ve broken free, Andrei thought in relief, and warily felt at his ear. It had swollen up and it was throbbing. Would you believe it—baboons! Where could baboons have come from? And such great, hefty ones . . . and so many of them! There had never been any baboons here
. . . if you didn’t count Izya Katzman, that is. And why precisely baboons? Why not tigers? He squirmed in his seat, and at that moment the truck jolted. Andrei went flying up and smashed back down onto something hard and unfamiliar. He stuck his hand under his backside, pulled out a pistol, and looked at it uncomprehendingly for a second. The pistol was small and black, with a short barrel and a ribbed handle. Then Donald suddenly said, “Careful. Give me that.”

  Andrei handed over the pistol and watched for a while as Donald squirmed around and stuck the gun in the back pocket of his boilersuit. Andrei suddenly broke out in a sweat. “So it was you up there . . . shooting?” he asked hoarsely.

  Donald didn’t answer. He blinked their single surviving headlamp as he overtook yet another truck. Several baboons darted through an intersection, right in front of their radiator, but Andrei wasn’t interested in them.

  “Where did you get a gun from, Don?”

  Again Donald didn’t answer; he just made a strange gesture with his hand—an attempt to pull a nonexistent hat down over his eyes.

  “I’ll tell you what, Don,” Andrei said firmly. “We’re going to City Hall right now. You’re going to hand in the pistol and explain how you got hold of it.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Donald responded, screwing up his face. “Why don’t you just give me a cigarette instead?”

  Andrei mechanically took out his pack. “It’s not nonsense,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything. You kept it quiet—OK, it’s your private business. And anyway, I trust you . . . But in the City only bandits have guns. I don’t want to make anything of it, but basically, I don’t understand you . . . basically, you’ve got to hand it in and explain everything. And don’t go acting like it’s all nonsense. I’ve seen the state you’ve been in just recently. Better go and tell them the whole story at once.”

  Donald turned his head for a second and looked into Andrei’s face. It wasn’t clear what that was in his eyes—maybe derision, maybe distress—but at that moment he seemed very old to Andrei, very infirm and somehow haggard.