Vladimir Orlov - Danilov the Violist

Immediately Danilov felt again that he was no giant, but a pathetic creature, bewildered and afraid, a flea before these gigantic galaxies and universes and the course of their destinies. Danilov felt a chill run through him. The sextet, which Danilov was forcing to play the passacaglia inside his head to resist the pressure from the investigators, grew still. The disks and spirals vanished, and a tiny dot glimmered in the blackness. It grew, or else Danilov shrank. Danilov realized that he had been put inside the dot -- not just a dot! -- inside the nucleus of some crummy atom that didn't interest even scientists! Or even more humiliating -- inside a simple particle that knew no peace or direction on Earth but that here in the Well was obedient and still. Now, inside that particle or nucleus, Danilov imagined the shimmering disks, those crystal constructions, and he seemed to perceive their movements and foresee the space plan of their orbits, and for some reason Karmadon's mean, haughty face flashed before him, as it had been on the ski slopes of Sokolniki Park.

Suddenly the disk shattered, the crystal grids began to list. Icy spheres and spires fell from them, exploding or melting as they fell. Before Danilov sat a shoemaker, a snub-nosed peasant of fifty or so from Mariana Roshcha, a tough Moscow neighborhood. He was repairing a pair of canvas espadrilles, the kind worn in Moscow in the late 1940s by dandies who whitened them with toothpowder. The shoemaker had a black leather apron on his lap and nails in his mouth, even though he didn't need nails to repair espadrilles. A gray mongrel jumped around his feet. The dog remotely resembled the Muravlyovs' dog, Salyut. The shoemaker looked over his work lovingly, decided he was pleased, and handed it to the dog.

The dog obligingly took the shoes and ate them. Then, with one paw, it pulled over the shoemaker and ate him too. It licked its chops, grimaced, and spat out the leather apron and the nails. It yawned and left. There were five nails. "But he had six in his mouth," Danilov remembered. "So what? What do I care?!"

The apron and nails lay scattered in the emptiness before Danilov for a long time. The main action now was performed by numerous objects, things, and machines. A suitcase, a wardrobe, a coal-cutter loader, metal clothes hangers, an airplane ramp, an asphalt spreader, bathroom fixtures of astonishing blue, a Jaguar XKE, a toy railroad with tunnels and switches, a dentist's drill and spit sink, and a hole puncher for office use ...

Of course Danilov did not have time to look at everything, nor did he want to; the machines and objects kept coming, shoving one another aside with rather chaotic movements. Often they fell apart. Sometimes they energetically and neatly reconstituted in their original shapes. But sometimes the parts did not return to their original states; either they couldn't, or there was no need to. Their movements went completely berserk. Something was happening. Danilov could not understand exactly what at first, but then the boards, shields, panels, glass, metal joints and blocks, lamps, porcelain semicircles, pinions, gears, spark plugs, wooden legs, and wheels formed almost living creatures, extremely varied, each with its own shape, walk, bearing, sometimes lithe and stealthy, sometimes thick and viscous, heavy and sleepy, with fuel oil for eyes -- and Danilov realized what was going on. Before him were the essences of die things and machines that had managed to get into the Well of Anticipation, into Danilov's current space and time. Freed of their bodies and functions, they could manifest the urges and passions stagnating inside diem. Aggressive, persistent, greedy, pushy, crowding, diey were crumpling and trampling the shoemaker's black apron left behind by the dog. Danilov was certain: It had not been taken away by accident, through the carelessness of the investigators. In the things' gestures, leaps, and pounces there were passion, triumph, and also pettiness.

"They've probably trampled the nails, too," thought Danilov. But he could no longer see the nails or the apron. The tempo of the unbalanced things' movements kept increasing; there were more and more of them, and each and every one tried angrily to break through to the center of the crowd, as if the forgotten apron were crucial to them. Unexpectedly a ring of fiery letters danced overhead: "Dried caviar, 1 ruble, 80 kopecks. Temruk Fish and Cannery." Now it looked as if some of the bulbs were burning out in the fiery ring, or something had gone wrong at the control panel; some of the letters went out, and then the whole ring vanished. Nothing happened to the dancing, screaming crowd. Except right in the middle, in the mush and heat, something probably was happening, perhaps some of the speediest and most persistent figures were being destroyed, squashed by the crush of newcomers, just born and wanting to transform themselves into animate existence.

But then the stampers, pushers, and squeezers underwent a transformation. Something new was arising. And the new was immediately transformed, too. The back half of a Chevrolet was combined with the torso and legs of an artiodactyl -- which species in particular, Danilov was not willing to hazard. Deer antlers ornamented a miniature powder compact. From the single fluttering wing of a cabbage moth the size of a bedspread a padlock dangled like an earring. A gramophone horn nestled up to the tentacles of a cheap, synthetic octopus, and small farmer's cheeses in dull brown foil leapt out of the horn, only to fall back in.

Then came faces familiar to Danilov from Earth superstitions and tall tales by people with vivid imaginations: vampires, werewolves, and toothless cannibals, who had scared little boys; and a melancholy monster with orange foam on its gums; and Fantomas, and Frankenstein monsters, and cheap strumpet witches from the Tyrolean Mountains; and blue drowned corpses, lured once upon a time by mermaids; and with them dead mermaids, victims of water pollution; and fierce darmapals, with seven faces and twenty arms and a multitude of eyes -- they wore tiger skins, crowns of human skulls, and necklaces taken from chopped-off heads -- some held a mongoose in one hand, others a carrot; and a white, three-eyed czamvala, with fiery hair and a wild green scarf, who controlled twilight; and obnoxious assurs, and sneaky apsars, whose dance, once glimpsed, is enough to make you want to die; and black idols, and voluptuous bugbears, nervous with mange, from the equator; and grim hounds from the underworld with eyes like saucers; and bats with drool perpetually dripping onto their poorly tied neckties. Everybody showed up!

All at once, one of these phantoms was bouncing around on a motorcycle and running down his neighbors. Another was blowing on the saxophone. A third put on a bikini made of crow's nests. Someone else was gnawing on mercury-vapor lamps, someone was dashing about in an orange suit that protected against radiation fallout and poison gas, someone was waving a harpoon, and someone else was firing on the crowd with a thirteen-barrel howitzer. All hell had broken loose!

In the ever-increasing crowd, Danilov began to make out clearly unrelated visions. Here and there, as if on separate screens, luminous moving pictures appeared, and the subjects of all were equally unpleasant to Danilov. A child was being cut up by a knife as his blood poured into a bucket. On a forest-covered mountaintop, a Cossack rode out on his raven steed, a sleeping page behind him; the Cossack threw a livid corpse into an abyss, and the bony fingers of yellow skeletons grabbed the corpse and began choking it; a huge buried blackened skeleton desperately tried to chew its way up through the ground to get at the corpse, but in vain; it suffered, tormented by its impotence, and the mountains shook and houses tumbled. On another screen a beautiful woman, very young, was immured in a tower; she struggled, trying to escape her doom, but brick after brick sealed the niche, and gray mortar held them tight. On another, mines fell in a green valley, shards of metal and chunks of flesh filled the air; the people who were still alive ran about and stabbed one another; thick clouds of dust were raised by the shells and bombs; a black spider crawled along the cold neck of a corporal lying face down in the grass. A tidal wave washed away people, breaking rocks behind a wall. A tree that had miraculously survived died in the burned-out earth. And here Danilov sensed a new twist in the visions -- if visions they were. Potent smells intensified -- a reek of burned things and diabolical chemistry.