Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

“That’s all right, she’s singing about the Vatican,” said Perkhushkov, listening closely. “That’s allowed.”

“You don’t have to shoot her, just catch her,” said Antonina Sergeevna sympathetically. “She’s not so bad.”

“What do you mean, not shoot her, when she’s right out in the open?” said Zmeev in amazement. “Amangeldyev, give me the gun.”

The colonel hoisted the gun on his shoulder and fired. Olga Khristoforovna fell from the horse.

“Now she’s not singing,” explained the colonel. “Let’s have another drink. The pickles are good.”

“What are you doing?” Lyonechka screamed. “Why are you shooting people?”

But no one listened to him.

“Shooting—is beautiful. It’s moving,” Zmeev told his drink-flushed comrades. “After all, what do we value in life—what pleasures, I mean? In pickles—we value the crunch, in kisses— the smack, and in gunshots—the loud, clear bang. Just now we were coming here through the woods, and suddenly from all sides—a bunch of Negroes. Like this little lady here,” he said, pointing at Judy. “All painted white, feathers in their noses, feathers in their ears, even, forgive me, in front of the ladies I won’t say where, but there were feathers there too. Superb targets, little toys. We had a good shoot.”

“Was anyone left alive?” asked Akhmed Khasianovich.

“Not a one, I assure you. It was all clean.”

“Well, all right, then. We’ll call off the blimps. Retreat,” sighed Akhmed Khasianovich.

“Let them stay!” cried the inebriated Vasily Paramonovich. “Aren’t they beautiful? Just like silver pigeons. I remember when I was just a little tyke I used to keep pigeons. You wave your hand and they—frrrrr!—they fly off! And how they quiver, quiver, quiver! Ah!”

“Well, one last round—and we’ll go for a ride,” proposed the colonel. “What do you young people say? We’ll look for mushrooms.”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Svetlana begged, admiring the colonel. “I want mushrooms, mushrooms.”

“Amangeldyev, Mush… rrrooooms!!!”

In the tipsiness and turmoil it was hard to say who sat, lay, or stood where, or who hung on whom, but, twining into a living lump, we were already racing in the Mercedes over hummocks and roots, and the pines zipped by, merging into a sturdy fence, and the wild raspberry whipped the windows, and Judy cheeped, pushing away the fat stomach of the sleeping Vasily Paramonovich, and Antonina Sergeevna bleated, and Spiridonov, squeezed in somewhere just under the roof, played someone’s national anthem, and no one divided us into the clean and unclean, and the sunset that appeared out of nowhere blazed like the yawn of a scarlatina-infected throat, and it was too early to let the crow out of the ark, for it was farther than ever to firm ground.

“My little rifle!” said the colonel, tickling Svetlana.

“Are you married?” Svetlana asked her magnificent beloved.

“Yes, siree. I’m married.”

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No, siree, it doesn’t matter.”

“I want mushrooms right now,” begged Svetlana.

“You’ll have your mushrooms. I’ll show you a toadstool you’ll never forget,” promised the colonel.

“Oh, the girl is going to get herself into trouble,” whined Spiridonov through his anthem, feasting his eyes on Svetlana. And she was something to look at—but Svetlana, shining with happiness, was not meant for the invalid—her hair glowed with its own light, her eyes had turned purple like a mermaid’s, her powder had blown away and her makeup fallen off, and she was so beautiful that Spiridonov swore quietly and pledged that he would give away half a kingdom for a glance from her—half a kingdom with all its half-palaces, half-stables, half-barrels of kvass, with all its mushrooms, pearls, tin, and brocade, with its kulich and gingerbread dough, raisins, bridles, saffron, burlap mats, sickles, plows, and rubies, its wild turkeys, azure flowers, and morocco leather half-boots. Only he didn’t have any of this.

The ark stopped, and Svetlana, arm in arm with Colonel Zmeev, walked into the forest on tiptoe.

“I’ll hire myself out as a sailor, and carry you off to Bombay!” Spiridonov shouted after her like a fool. And he himself blushed.

“We, too, were young turks once upon a time,” sighed Vasily Paramonovich who had awakened. “And what are you doing here?” he suddenly jumped on Judy. “What’s she doing here?”

“I… animals… want to cure animals…” babbled Judy.

“She wants to cure animals. You should cure us, that’s what,” Vasily Paramonovich raged, suddenly angry for some unknown reason. “Any fool can cure animals! I soft-soaped Agafonov, I soft-soaped Kuznetsov, I worked hard at it, how much good I did for people—anyone else would have puked.

Need cement—go to Vasily Paramonovich, need stucco—go to Vasily Paramonovich, but for promotions—go to someone else. That’s the point, not curing animals. All they do is walk around and around, around and around.”

“He’s kind, very kind,” explained Antonina Sergeevna. “The weather’s affected him, but he’s very kind. At home he’s got canaries, ten of them, and in the morning as soon as he’s up, he sings to them—cheep, cheep, cheep, and they already know him, they chirp. They can feel kindness. Well, now, where are our people?”

Straightening his military jacket, Colonel Zmeev came out of the forest.

“Everything’s in order. Let’s go have dinner.”

“But where’s Svetlana?”

“I accidentally killed her,” laughed the colonel. “I was hugging her and hugging her, well and… I squashed her a little. You know how it happens. It’s all right, I’ll send a unit up later, they’ll dig a hole. There’s not much work there. It’s army business. Well, let’s go. Amangeldyev!”

It’s strange now, after fifteen years have passed, to think that not one of us has remained—neither Svetlana, who died, one likes to think, of happiness; nor Judy—even her grave is gone now, replaced by a road; nor Lyonechka, who lost his reason after Judy’s death and ran into the forest on all fours—though they do say that he’s alive and that some frightened children saw him lapping water at a stream, and there’s a group of engineers, aficionados of the mysterious, who organized a society for the capture of “the wild mid-Russian man,” as they refer to him scientifically, and every summer they set up ambushes with strings, nets, and hooks and set out bait—cakes, Danish, rolls with marzipan—not understanding that Lyonechka, an exalted and poetic individual, will only fall for the spiritual. Spiridonov’s gone, he ended his life quietly with a natural death at a venerable age, and had subsequently invented many interesting things: a talking teapot, and automatic slippers, and a cigarette case with an alarm clock. There’s no one left, and you don’t know whether to regret this, whether to grieve, or whether to bless the time, which took these unfit, unnecessary people back into its thick, impenetrable stream.

Well, at least they sank into it untouched, whole, but Uncle Zhenya was picked up in pieces, in fasciae, hairs, and tufts; moreover they never did find one of his eyes, and he lay in his coffin with a black velvet patch on his face just like Moshe Dayan or Nelson, in a new striped suit borrowed from the embassy cook, to whom, by the way, they kept promising and promising but never did pay any compensation, which pushed him into counterfeiting invoices for marinated guava. And it’s well known: once you start it’s hard to stop; the cook got carried away, it turned his head, and although every day he promised himself he’d stop, the demon was stronger. Somehow a Rolls-Royce appeared, then a second, a third, a fourth; then, of course, he developed a passion for art and began to understand all the subtleties of the expensive contemporary avant-garde and didn’t like politics anymore, the ambassador and certain of the embassy secretaries didn’t suit him—careful, cook!—then came the connection with the local mafia, the racket and narcotics business, secret control over a network of banks and brothels, intrigues with the military, and plans for a widespread government coup.