issued from the Belyaevs; their celebration was going full blast.
Even on ordinary days, however, the Belyaevs often celebrated. So, when one hot night in July Masha heard a knock on the door, she thought first of them. With the heavy rocking horse in readiness, she opened the door. On an earlier occasion the only thing that had saved her from the Belyaevs was their fear of the cast iron horse. On the threshold, however, stood a policeman.
«Comrade Golubova? Maria? Or Lydia?»
This is it, Masha guessed, and she dropped the rocking horse.
«Does Lydia Golubova live here?» the policeman asked again, picking up the rocking horse.
«Out on the… I mean… she's away on a business trip,» Masha managed.
«Get ready, you're coming with us,» the policeman barked, grabbing the rocking horse and putting it in a laundry basket which he had carried out into the corridor. «Make it snappy.»
Masha peered into the corridor of the barracks: there was hustle and bustle there, armed soldiers, someone had broken a glass salad bowl and a young lieutenant was gluing it back together. Two firemen were helping Granny Anya carry a bed out while Granny Tanya was carried out lying on her sofa and crossing herself.
The Belyaevs were still bawling out their ditties: «Sticky-wicky, Grampa's wishin' — too bad Gramma's gone out fishin'.»
«Silence! You're disturbing the lieutenant,» the policeman yelled sternly.
«Are we having an earthquake?» Masha asked.
«How could there be an earthquake here?» answered a cadet and began piling her daughter's toys into the stroller.
It took them half an hour to carry out all the belongings. Only the lieutenant was holding up the eviction — he was still trying to resuscitate the salad bowl.
On the street stood lots of trucks loaded with boats. Some men with a few days' beard — recruited from the drunk tank, no doubt — were unloading the boats and hastily piling furniture and dishes into the trucks. The residents of the barracks were standing on the trucks' platforms receiving their belongings. Soldiers with walkie-talkies scurried here and there.
«Did you get the gunpowder? Where are the paratroopers?»
«Be here any minute now.»
«Gonna demo Pirogov Street too?»
«Idiot! Put the dynamite here. This is the sensitive spot.»
«Children should all go in the cabs.» A truck marked «Live Fish» pulled up, followed by two ambulances. An aroma of roses drifted by. Masha followed her nose to the source and spied a truck for transporting livestock. Behind the wooden lattices some men from the South, probably marketplace workers, sat hugging immense armfuls of roses. Their faces were animated and indignant. But at this point the landing of some helicopters almost flattened them, and the Southerners began obediently unloading the flowers. The helicopters gained altitude and also began ejecting some bud-like objects which blossomed out and turned into courageous parachutists.
Masha turned toward the voices and saw the Belyaevs fighting with a paratrooper, yanking the pocket out of his spotted overalls together with the flask it contained. The paratrooper adroitly outmaneuvered them.
«Comrade commander, may I retaliate?»
«I'll show you — all you wanna do is punch somebody in the nose. What we have here is a peaceful resettlement of residents to peaceful apartments and at the same time a drill in evacuation techniques.»
«Are we going to get apartments?» Liza asked. «Oh, Masha, look!»
The lieutenant with the salad bowl, who had never flagged in his task, was speedily gluing in the last piece of glass. The sergeant chalked the number «1» on their truck and muttered a grumpy aside, «What's he doing with that silly dish?»
«I dare say the Moscow Commission will want everything just so,» the lieutenant replied stiffly for reasons known only to him.
«Let's get moving,» came the order, and the truck Masha was riding in tore swiftly ahead, spinning her around and throwing her left and right among her things. Through the cab's rear window she could see her daughter sitting on Liza's lap, drooling intently. Dogs commented on the resettlement with a respectable hoarse bark. Some tights were flapping in the wind. Masha had not managed to tuck them in properly. Just as she bent over to unhook them from the side, the truck lurched over a railroad track, and Masha flew out with the tights.
As she fell to the ground, her instant inventory confirmed that everything was in the right place, although some superficial bumps appeared — on her elbow, for example. The tights were still flapping in the wind like the banner of some obscure liberation movement. The driver of the second truck saw her fall and stopped. «The doctors will be coming in the middle of the column.»
«Yes, but my baby's in the first truck.»
«Well, climb on up.»
They took them to a new twelve-story building and began getting them settled. Masha was given a separate two-room apartment. And what an apartment! With a balcony and a pantry. Two women were still wallpapering the entry hall. Liza and her children moved into a neighboring apartment. Suddenly an explosion rang out, followed by two more. Masha ran out onto the balcony.
«What's that?»
«They're excavating,» a policeman answered politely from the roadway.
And so it was that by noon, in place of the Levanevsky Settlement, there lapped the waters of Lake Jolly. In the clear water a goldfish played, flashing its golden sides. Masha could see a whole school of fish like it. She wanted to touch them, but the cast prevented her from dipping her right hand into the water. They had put the cast on her at the hospital because some sort of «toma» had sprung up on her elbow due to the injury. The cast gleamed brightly white, out of harmony with the gay clothing of the promenaders.
The brand new black asphalt was still elastic beneath her heels, and the smell of it wrought havoc with the aroma of the roses in enormous vases that stood on marble pedestals. From a loudspeaker jumped the strains of a merry tune.
Unexpectedly, a man threw off his clothes and leapt into the water, drowning out the loudspeaker with his song.
Belyaev — for that was who it was — wailed at the top of his lungs in a surprisingly unintoxicated voice. Masha did not recognize his face immediately: the customary iridescent bags under his eyes had disappeared. All at once he dove, and in the depths Masha could make out a corner of the barracks with some knocked-out windows through which Belyaev slipped, right after the goldfish.
Just then a boat was launched from the opposite shore. In it was a lady accompanied by a gentleman. The lady trailed her hand in the water, her shapely torso reclining. As they swept past her, Masha recognized Alena.
ANASTASIA GOSTEVA
CLOSED AMERICAS
Translated by Subhi Sherwell.
He was sitting on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market, where flowed the invisible boundary, separating the world of importunate and hysterical Indian bartering from the realm of the unhurried and solid Tibetan enterprise; between the Indians fleecing the wide-eyed, gullible tourists, brown and oily Indians who might almost have been moulded out of whole lumps of cannabis, and the Tibetans, hewn from a sandalwood tree in a few sharp, sure strokes by a certain notorious carpenter from Galilee.