The Prank, page 10
VASILY SEMI-BULATOV
IN THE TRAIN CAR
MAIL TRAIN number such-and-such is speeding at full steam from Fun-Crash Station to Save-Yourselves-if-You-Can Station. The locomotive whistles, hisses, puffs, and snorts. The train cars shake and their ungreased wheels howl like wolves and screech like owls. The sky, the earth, and the train cars are all pitch-black. “Just you wait, just you wait” thump the train cars, trembling with age. “Woe! Wooooe! Woe!” joins in the locomotive. Pickpockets and the drafts sweep through the train cars. It’s terrifying. I stick my head out of the window and stare at the limitless expanse. All the semaphore lights are green, which means that any trouble is still some way off. No sign of the station signal or station lights. It’s dark, it’s dreary, my thoughts turn to death, to childhood memories. Dear God!
“I’m a sinner,” I whisper, “a terrible sinner!”
Someone is trying to get into my back pocket. My pocket’s empty, but it still gives me the willies. I turn my head. A man in a straw hat and a dark gray shirt stands beside me. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask him, patting down my pockets.
“Nothing, sir!” He jerks his hand away and turns his back to mine, leaning hard against me. “I’m just looking out the window!”
A hoarse whistle. The train slows down more and more and finally stops. I get out of the train car and head to the station restaurant for a drink to lift my spirits. Passengers and members of the train crew cram the restaurant.
“Well, they say it’s vodka, but it’s got no bite,” says the respectable-looking conductor-in-chief to a fat passenger. The fat passenger struggles to reply. He’s got a fossilized sandwich stuck in his throat.
“Gendarme! Gendarme!” someone on the train platform bellows—like a hungry mastodon, an ichthyosaurus, or a plesiosaurus from primeval antediluvian times. I walk over to see what’s the matter. There’s a man with a cockade standing next to a first-class car, displaying his bare feet for the whole world to see. Poor man, his shoes and socks were stolen off him while he slept.
“What am I going to wear now?” he hollers. “I’m traveling all the way to Rrrevel! Isn’t there any security?”
There’s a policeman by him. “This is no place to make a scene,” he insists. I go back to my car, number 224. Everything’s the same: darkness, snoring, stale tobacco, and rotgut—this is Russia all right. A red-haired court investigator traveling to Kiev from Ryazan snores at my side, while a pretty girl dozes some two or three feet away from him. A peasant, wearing a straw hat, wheezes, snorts, turns and tosses, and has no idea what to do with his long legs. Off in the corner, someone’s having a bite to eat, chomping so everyone can hear. The common folk sleep soundly under the benches. The door creaks. Two shriveled old women enter with bags slung over their backs.
“Why don’t we sit ourselves down here, dearie,” says one. “How dark it is! Trials and tribulations. Oh, I just stepped on someone. Where’s Pakhom?”
“Pakhom? Oh, dear! Where could he be? Oh, dear me!”
The old woman bustles over to the window, opens it, and peers out at the platform.
“Pakhom,” she calls in a tremulous voice. “Where are you? Pakhom! We’re right here!”
“I’m in trouble!” the shout comes from outside. “They ain’t letting me in.”
“Ain’t letting you in? Which one of them ain’t letting you in? Don’t you pay any attention! No one can stop you if you’ve got a genuine ticket!”
“They ain’t selling tickets no more! The ticket window’s closed!”
Someone leads a horse across the platform. Sounds of clattering hooves and snorting.
“Get back!” hollers a policeman. “Where do you think you’re going? Why are you raising a ruckus?”
“Petrovna!” Pakhom groans.
Petrovna throws down her sack, grabs a large tin kettle, and rushes out of the train. The second bell rings. A short conductor with a small black mustache enters.
“You better go buy a ticket!” he tells the old man across from me. “The controller’s coming!”
“Yes? Well, that’s no good. Which one? The prince?”
“Nah. The prince isn’t coming here, not even if they chase after him with a stick.”
“So which one then? The one with the beard?”
“Yeah, with the beard . . .”
“Well, if it’s him, then it’s all right. He’s decent.”
“What you do is up to you.”
“Are there a lot of fare-beaters?”
“About forty.”
“Really? Good for them! They know how to play the game! As long as the controller doesn’t catch them!”
My heart sinks. I’m a fare-beater, one of the passengers who hands over cash to the conductor not the ticket vendor. It’s a fine thing to be a fare-beater, dear reader! The rate’s unwritten, but fare-beaters get 75 percent off on the price of a ticket—they don’t have to line up to buy it, they don’t have to show it, and the conductors are more polite to them to boot! Everything you could possibly wish for!
“Why should I pay whoever whatever?” mumbles the old man. “Never! I give my money directly to the conductor. The conductor needs it more than Polyakov!”*
The third bell rattles.
“Oh, dear!” the old woman said, bustling around. “Where could Petrovna be? There goes the third bell! Lord have mercy. She got left behind! She got left behind, the poor thing. And her things are here. What’s going to happen with her things, with her bag? Dear me, she got left behind!”
The old woman thinks for a minute.
“At least she’ll have her things!”—and out the window goes Petrovna’s bag.
The next station is Khaldeevo; my Frum travel guide, however, calls it Common Grave.
The controller and the conductor-in-chief walk in with a candle.
“Tickets!” shouts the conductor-in-chief.
The controller turns to me and to the old man. “Tickets!”
We huddle, we cringe, we hide our hands, we glue our eyes to the reassuring face of the conductor-in-chief.
“Get their tickets,” says the controller to his companion and moves on. We’re saved.
“Ticket! Hey, you! Your ticket!” The conductor-in-chief jostles a sleeping young man. The young man wakes up and takes a yellow ticket out of his hat.
“So where do you think you’re heading?” asks the controller, turning the ticket between his fingers. “You’re going the wrong way!”
“You dolt, you’re going the wrong way!” says the conductor-in-chief. “You got onto the wrong train, you numskull! You should have gotten on the one for Zhivoderovo and we’re going to Khaldeevo! Here, take it back! It never pays to be an idiot!”
The young man blinks rapidly and stares blankly at the smirking public. He dabs his eyes with his sleeve.
“Don’t cry,” people say. “Ask for help! Look at the size of you, you big blockhead—bawling like a baby! You’re probably married with children, and just look at you!”
“Ticket!” The conductor-in-chief turns to a peasant in a top hat.
“Huh?”
“Ticket! Snap to it!”
“A ticket? I need a ticket?”
“Your ticket!”
“I got it . . . You want to see my ticket . . . Well, I’m not going to stop you. Here comes.” Slow as a snail, the peasant reaches inside his shirt, producing a scrap of greasy paper. He hands it to the controller.
“What’s that you’re giving me? That’s your passport! Give me your ticket!”
“I haven’t got another ticket!” says the peasant, alarmed.
“So why are you on the train, if you don’t have a ticket?”
“But I paid.”
“Who’d you pay? Stop lying!”
“I paid the conductor.”
“Which conductor?”
“Damned if I know! Some conductor, that’s all . . . ‘Don’t need a ticket,’ he tells me. ‘You can travel without one’ . . . So I didn’t get it . . .”
“We’ll see about that at the station! Madam, your ticket!”
The door creaks, opens, and to everyone’s surprise in walks Petrovna.
“I could barely find our car. How’re you supposed to tell them apart—they all look the same . . . And they didn’t let Pakhom on! Those vipers . . . Where’s my bag?”
“Oh, trials and tribulations! I threw it out the window! I thought you’d been left behind!”
“You threw it where?”
“Out the window. How was I supposed to know any better?”
“And who asked you to do that? You’re a witch, a regular witch, Lord forgive me! What do I do now? Why didn’t you throw your own bag out? Or your own ugly mug! I hope your guts crawl out of you!”
People are laughing. “Send a telegraph from the next station!” someone advises.
Petrovna is wailing and spouting profanities. Her friend clutches her own sack; she’s weeping too. The conductor walks in.
“Whose are these?” he shouts. He holds up Petrovna’s things.
“A pretty one!” the old man across from me whispers to me. He gestures at the pretty girl. “Real pretty. And I haven’t got any chloroform here, dammit! One whiff of that and you can kiss her as much as you’d like! Everyone else is asleep!”
The man in the straw hat keeps rolling over, loudly grumbling about his bothersome legs.
“Scientists this,” he mumbles, “scientists that! There’s no going against nature! Scientists. Why can’t they figure out how to screw your legs on and off. Now that would be something!”
“I had nothing to do with it! Ask the deputy prosecutor!” the investigator raves in his sleep.
In a distant corner, two schoolboys, a corporal, and a young man in blue-tinted glasses are playing cards by the light of their glowing cigarettes.
To my right is a tall fancy lady of the no-need-to-ask-twice variety. She reeks of powder and patchouli.
“Travel is so delightful!” a cad murmurs into her ear, murmuring sweetly, disgustingly sweetly, saying his g’s, n’s, and r’s French-fashion. “You get to know people so quickly and so well, so intimately, when you travel. I just adore travel!”
A kiss. Another one. What the hell? I can’t believe what I’m seeing. And now the pretty girl wakes up, looks around, and . . .without a second thought, lowers her head onto the shoulder of Themis’s* votary, the investigator. And still he dozes on, poor fool!
The train comes to a halt. We’re at a way station.
“The train will stop for two minutes,” a hoarse, cracked bass voice says from outside the train car. Two minutes pass, then another two. Five, ten, twenty minutes go by, and still the train stands. What the hell is going on? I step out of the car and head over to the train engine.
“Ivan Matveich! Are you almost done, dammit?” the conductor-in-chief is yelling into the space underneath the engine.
The train engineer squirms out from under the engine on his belly. He’s red, sweaty, and has a smear of soot on his nose.
“Do you believe in God or not?” He turns on the conductor-in-chief. “Are you a human being or not? Why are you rushing me? Don’t you see? I hope you all croak! Call this an engine, do you? This here is no engine, it’s a piece of junk! It won’t go!”
“So what do we do?”
“Do whatever you want! Get me another one, I’m not driving this one! Put yourself in my place.”
The engineer’s assistants are running around the broken engine, tapping it and shouting. The stationmaster, wearing a red cap, is cracking jokes with his assistant about Jews and their sidesplitting day-to-day lives. It’s raining. I head back to my car. A stranger in a straw hat and a dark gray shirt runs past. He’s clutching a suitcase. Oh my God, it’s mine!
* Samuel Polyakov (1837–1888) was the most famous of Russian railroad magnates; he constructed more than a fourth of Russian railroads.
* Themis was the ancient Greek goddess of law, justice, and order.
1,001 PASSIONS, OR, A DREADFUL NIGHT
(A Timid Imitation of Victor Hugo)
THE TOWER clock struck midnight. I shuddered. The time had come. Convulsively, I grabbed Theodore’s hand and together we departed for the street. A sky as dark as typographer’s ink. It was as dark outside as it is inside a hat pulled down low. A dark night—like a day shut up in a nutshell. Cloaks wrapped tight, we set off, the wind gusting, chilling us to the bone. Rain and snow—those two sodden brothers—battered our faces with terrible force.
Though it was winter, lightning was everywhere, furrowing the sky. Thunder, that terrible, that majestic companion of lightning, as lovely as blue eyes flashing, as fast as thought, horrifyingly jolted the air. Theodore’s ears glowed with electricity. The fires of St. Elmo crackled and flew overhead. I looked upward. I trembled. Who does not tremble before Nature’s grandeur? Several shiny meteors flew across the sky. I counted twenty-eight and pointed them out to Theodore.
“A bad omen!” he muttered, turning as pale as Carrara marble.
The wind groaned, howled, and wailed. The groaning of the wind—what is it but a conscience groaning under the weight of horrific crimes? Thunder leveled an eight-story building beside us, which burst into flames. I heard shrieks issuing from inside. Without stopping, we walked on. What was one burning building to me? Within my breast burned the fires of one hundred and fifty buildings! Somewhere out in the vast distance a bell tolled slowly, lugubriously, monotonously. The elements battled each other. Unseen forces strove to achieve a terrifying harmony of the elements. What are these forces? Will mankind ever know them?
A timorous yet daring hope!
We summoned a coachman. We climbed into the carriage and raced off. He is a brother of the wind, the coachman. As a daring thought races within the mysterious convolutions of the brain, so we raced. I thrust a purse full of gold into the coachman’s hand. The gold aided the whip, redoubling the speed of the horses’ legs.
“Antonio, where are you taking me?” Theodore moaned. “You look like an evil demon. Hell glimmers in your dark eyes. I fear . . .”
Pathetic coward! I stayed silent. He loved her. She loved him passionately. And I must kill him because I loved her more than life. I loved her and I hated him. That dreadful night he would die. He would pay for his love with his life. Love and hatred seethed within me. They were my second existence. These two sisters, met together in a single vessel, these two spiritual vandals, wreak desolation.
“Stop!” I told the coachman as the carriage rolled up to the destination. Theodore and I leapt out. The moon peered down coldly from behind the clouds. The moon—it is an impartial, silent witness of sweet moments of love and of revenge. Now it would witness the death of one of us. Before us lay an abyss, a bottomless pit, as bottomless as the barrel of Danaus’s criminal daughters.* We stood at the edge of a dead volcanic crater. Frightening legends were told about this volcano. My knee moved. Down plunged Theodore into the dreadful abyss! A volcano’s crater—it is the earth’s very maw.
“Damnation!” he shouted in response to my own curses.
A powerful man hurling his enemy into a volcano crater because of a woman’s beautiful eyes—it is a magnificent, grandiose, and edifying picture! The only thing missing was lava!
The coachman. The coachman—so like a statue to ignorance erected by Fate itself. Away with the predictable! The coachman followed Theodore. I sensed that now only love remained in my breast. I fell facedown upon the earth and began to weep from the rapture of it all. Tears of rapture are the result of a divine reaction that occurs in the depths of a loving heart. The horses neighed merrily. How onerous it is not to be human! I freed them of their bestial miserable lives. I killed them. Death is both fetters and freedom from fetters.
I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.
Three hours after wreaking my revenge, I was at the door of her apartment. The dagger, that friend of death, helped me make my way there over dead bodies. I strained my ears. She did not sleep. She was daydreaming. I listened. She was silent. The silence lasted almost four hours. Four hours for a man in love—it is like four-nineteenths of a century! Finally she called for her maid. The maid walked past me. I gazed at her demonically. She noticed me looking. Her wits left her. I killed her. Better to die than to live witless.
“Annette,” she cried, “why is Theodore not here yet? Dread gnaws at my heart. I am gripped by a dark premonition. Oh, Annette! Go, bring him here. He is probably out carousing with that horrible godless Antonio! My god, who is it that I see? Antonio!”
I went to her. She blanched . . .
“Go!” she cried. Terror distorted her noble, beautiful features.
I gazed at her. The gaze is the sword of the soul. She staggered. Within my gaze she saw everything: Theodore’s death, demonic passion, myriad human desires. My pose—it was majesty itself. My eyes glimmered with electricity. My hair was stirring and standing on end. Before her she saw a demon within a mortal shell. I saw her feast her eyes. This silence of the tomb and mutual contemplation continued for about four hours. Then thunder rolled. She fell upon my chest. A man’s chest—it is a woman’s fortress. I clasped her in my embrace. Both of us cried out. Her bones cracked. A galvanic current ran through our bodies. A passionate kiss . . .
She fell in love with the demon within me. I wanted her to fall in love with the angel within me. “I am donating one and a half million franks to the poor!” I said. She fell in love with the angel within me. She wept. I wept. What tears they were! A month later, a solemn wedding ceremony took place at the church of Saints Titus and Hortense. I was marrying her. She was marrying me. The poor were blessing us. She begged me to forgive my enemies—those I had killed earlier. I forgave them. I left for America with my young wife. My loving young wife was an angel in the virginal forests of America, an angel before whom lions and tigers bowed low. I was a young tiger. Three years after our marriage, old Sam was fussing over our curly-haired little boy. The boy looked more like his mother than he did like me. That vexed me. Yesterday my second son was born—I was so happy, I hanged myself. My second boy reaches out his little hands to the readers, exhorting them not to listen to his papa. His papa had no children; his papa had no wife. His papa fears marriage like the plague. My boy doesn’t lie. He is an infant. Believe him. Infancy is a holy age. None of this ever happened . . . Good night.
