«I'll show you swords and ploughshares,» said Gray Head. He yanked Redface into the train car and boxed his ear. «Lost your head, huh, Blyakhin?»
Blyakhin crawled over to the compartment on all fours, sniveling:
«That's it — I whipped myself inna shape. Must not be the third day after all. Must'a made it to the fourth long time ago…»
Gray Head showed the circus folk the door.
«Get out!»
Resigned, they walked out to the hallway.
«I said out! Off the train! Civilians don't belong here.»
«We can't just jump off with the train moving,» grumbled Alex.
Gray Head shut the door. They could hear dull blows and muffled whimpering from inside the compartment.
«That's our train!» Alex cried out.
A train pulling circus cars was rolling along the next track, parallel to them. But the train hauling military equipment soon overtook it.
The sun, sinking behind the horizon, burst forth from the other side of the circus cars' locomotive, dazzling Orest and Alex.
They made it to Zaschekino that night. The rail yard was lit up with powerful lamps mounted on masts high overhead; it seemed brighter than in daytime. Alex and Orest stretched out on some stunted grass between the lines. Mollie lay next to them.
«It's as bright as the circus ring, under the big top,» smiled Orest.
«Wish I could have something to drink,» Alex sighed.
«I'll run over and get us something,» Orest answered instantly, and dashed off.
Alex hmphed, stroking the dog.
«He can be trained too, huh?»
Mollie gave a wide yawn, seasoned with a slight whimper.
Orest brought back a plastic bottle of Coca Cola.
«We lucked out. Some guys were ripping off a container back there, so I went to the trouble of getting us a little something… Drink up, Alyona!»
Alex looked him over and laughed. She took the bottle, twisted it open and drank.
Echoing voices from the loudspeakers mingled with engine whistles and the rumble of wheels.
Some sort of freight train arrived. It sailed past and ground to a halt in the distance, with a sigh. Out of a navy freezer car emerged the sleepy figure of what could have been a man or a woman.
«Where's the water tower here?»
«Don't know,» answered Orest.
The trackman showed up. The freezer man turned to him:
«Hey, buddy, can you move us under the water? Our refrigerators are defrosting.»
«Tomorrow.»
«We've got highly perishable products onboard. We're haulin' poultry to Svobodino. We're supposed to be there by tomorrow.»
«Can't do it. We don't have any engines. We'll send you off day after tomorrow.»
«Well, isn't that an engine I see puffin' away over there, or what?»
A locomotive was creeping backwards and forwards on some empty rails.
«That's for the circus. They're supposed to get here soon. They had an elephant go wild on 'em. Hell if we're gonna be keeping 'em here!»
Orest jumped over to them.
«What do you mean, an elephant went wild? Can't leave them alone for a minute!»
«They're coming!» Alex clamored.
The multi-colored little cars appeared at last. In the leading car's entrance stood the old codger, Gordey, smoking a pipe. When he saw Alex, he started waving his crutch.
«How come ya didn't water the pigeons?»
«We got left behind, Gordey, for Pete's sake. Way back in Gnilukha, what're you talkin' about?!»
«Huh? Ya mean ya didn't even feed the horses, for a whole day? Orest, wilya gettaload'a that!»
Meanwhile, another car slowly rolled over. Inside, a curly-haired lad was peeling potatoes. He hopped over to the door.
«Ou-la la! How'd you all get here so fast?»
«What, you're telling me nobody back there noticed a thing? At all?»
Alex turned to Orest with a flabbergasted look, and screamed, «WE-GOT-LEFT-BEHIND!!!» into the ether.
Orest, meanwhile, ran over to the car with a painted elephant on its side, and clambered up onto its footboard. In its entryway stood a red-haired, freckled fat woman holding a monkey.
«What happened to the elephant?!» Orest blurted out.
The fat lady cracked up:
«Nothing. We cooked up the story way back in Zheltokrysino, that he'd gone berserk on us and that he might break up the whole station. They sure sent us on our way a lot faster. And then farther on they alerted everybody up ahead about the 'wild elephant.' So we had us green lights all the way to the end of the line.»
The train braked to a halt. The engine expecting the circus cars pulled back to allow their uncoupled locomotive to pass, then promptly got down to hooking itself up in the old engine's place.
«Hey!» they called out to Alex from the next circus car, as if nothing had happened. «So, you decided to walk the dog here after all, huh?»
«Sure,» smiled Alex. «It's nice to breathe fresh air once in a while…»
And, whistling Mollie over, she scurried to her car.
OLGA SLAVNIKOVA
KRYLOV'S CHILDHOOD
Translated by Marian Schwartz.
On a relief globe, the Urals look like an old, stretched out scar. There used to be a globe like that at the local history museum; its hollow bumps resembled a cardboard mask. A clumsy contraption caged inside four wooden ribs, you could spin it, and if you rubbed the globe's rough side it would make three or four turns with a plaintive creak, tumble across its own axis for the last time, and land with South America on the bottom. There, underneath, some irritating little piece of it would take a while to settle down. Young Krylov's mother, although in those days a thirty-year-old woman in high heels, had an old woman's job at the museum. She sat on an ordinary chair among the museum's marvels and kept people from touching the skeleton of the brown antediluvian mammoth, whose sole tusk looked like a broken ski with a splint jutting out in front.
But neither the globe nor the mammoth, to say nothing of the turgic cobra in green denatured alcohol, or the dusty dioramas on prehistoric themes, held any allure for young Krylov. His imagination was drawn by the crystals. They rested in the display windows in cardboard nests lined with cotton wool, and they also towered in the museum lobby, balancing out its patterned, cast iron plangency with their absolute and intact muteness. The most powerful rock crystal, inside of which iridescent mealy stone-snow seemed to be melting, turning into water, was taller than 12-year-old Krylov by its entire blunt fissured point. No less amazing were the black morions: two chunky druses, as if they'd been chopped out of solid resin with an ax. In the smoky quartzes called Venus's hairstone, through their tea-yellow, it was as if you were seeing bundles of iron needles, or the prickly leavings from a cut at the barber's. The crystals' sides, if you looked at them from a specular angle, were cross-hatched here and there, the way they teach you to cross-hatch figures in drawing class, while others had polished patches, as if they'd been through major renovations underground.
The museum had other, nontransparent minerals, too. Visitors always took a special interest in the massive gold nugget that looked like the mummy of some tiny animal. The woman guide, whom Krylov remembered by her black skirt and heavy feet stuffed into her stretched out scuffs, would tell the schoolchildren that a miner who dies underground petrifies sometimes and turns into his own statue. Afterward Krylov wasted no time clarifying whether or not this was so. It turned out that, indeed, under specific conditions organic remains can be replaced by sulfur-pyrite. There was no impermeable boundary between the mineral world and living nature.