Arkady Strugatsky: The Doomed City

"A caretaker should be a sweeper," Andrei remarked didactically, twirling the wrist of his right hand and focusing on his sensations: it seemed to him that he had slightly strained a tendon.

"They'll only make it all filthy again, won't they?" Donald said with loathing. "Before we've even turned around, they'll foul it up worse than before."

Wang tipped the trash into the last can, tamped it down with the shovel, and slammed the lid shut. "Now we can do it," he said, glancing around the arched passage. The entrance was clean now. Wang looked at Andrei and smiled. Then he looked up at Donald and said, "I'd just like to remind you -- "

"Come on, come on!" Donald shouted impatiently.

One-two. Andrei and Wang lifted the can. Three-four. Donald caught the can, grunted, gasped, and lost his grip. The can lurched over and crashed down onto the asphalt on its side. Garbage flew out across ten meters as if it had been shot from a cannon. Actively disgorging as it went, the can clattered into the courtyard. The reverberating echo spiraled up to the black sky between the walls.

"God al-fucking-mighty and the Holy Spirit," said Andrei, who had barely managed to leap out of the way. "Damn your fumblefingers!"

"I just wanted to remind you," Wang said meekly, "that one handle's broken off this can."

He took the broom and shovel and set to work, and Donald squatted on the edge of the truck bed and lowered his hands between his knees. "Dammit..." he muttered in a dull voice. "Damned mean trick."

Something had clearly been wrong with him for the last few days, and on this night in particular. So Andrei didn't start telling him what he thought about professors and their ability to do real work. He went to get the can and then, when he got back to the truck, he took off his mittens and pulled out his cigarettes. The stench from the open can was unbearable, so he lit up quickly and only then offered Donald one. Donald shook his head without speaking. His mood needed a lift. Andrei flung the burned match into the can and said, "Once upon a time in a little town there lived two night-soil men -- father and son. There weren't any sewers there, only pits full of slurry. And they scooped that shit out with a bucket and poured it into their barrel, and what's more, the father, as the more experienced specialist, went down into the pit, and the son handed the bucket down to him from above. Then one day the son lost his grip on the bucket and dumped it back on his old man. Well, his old man wiped himself down, looked up at him, and said bitterly, 'You're a total screwup, a real lunkhead. No good for anything. You'll be stuck up there your whole life.'"

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.