“The most amusing thing,” said Izya, “is that every little brick of this temple, every eternal book, every eternal melody, every unique architectural silhouette, bears within itself the compressed experience of this humankind, its thoughts and thoughts about it, ideas about the goals and contradictions of its existence; that no matter how separate it might seem from all the vital interests of this herd of swine, at the same time it is always inseparable from this herd and inconceivable without it…
“And another amusing thing,” Izya said, “is that no one actually builds this temple consciously… It can’t be planned out in advance on paper or in the brain of some genius; it grows of its own accord, unerringly absorbing all the best that human history produces.
“Maybe you think,” Izya asked acidly, “that the most exceptional builders of this temple aren’t swine? Lord Almighty, what hideous swine they are sometimes! The thief and scoundrel Benvenuto Cellini, the hopeless drunk Hemingway, the pederast Tchaikovsky, the schizophrenic and black reactionary Dostoyevsky, the thief and gallows bird François Villon… My God, the decent people among them are the rare ones! But like the coral polyps, they know not what they do. And neither does the whole of humankind. Generation after generation they guzzle, wallow in pleasure, ravage, kill, turn up their toes—and before you know it an entire coral atoll has sprung up, and how beautiful it is! And how enduring!”
“Well OK then,” Andrei said to him. “So it’s a temple. The only imperishable embodiment of value. OK. But then, what have we all got to do with this? What have I got to do with this?”
“Stop!” said Izya, grabbing his harness. “Wait. The stones.”
Yes, the stones here were certainly convenient—rounded and flat, like solidified cowpats.
“Are we going to build yet another temple?” Andrei asked with a chuckle. He took off his harness, stepped to one side, and picked up the nearest stone. The stone was exactly the kind required for a foundation—lumpy and prickly underneath, and smooth on the top, worn down by the dust and the wind. Andrei set it on a fairly level deposit of small pieces of crumbled stone, ground it in with movements of his shoulders as deeply and firmly as he could, and went to get another one.
While he was laying out the foundation he felt something like satisfaction: after all, this was work, wasn’t it, not meaningless movements of the legs but actions performed with a definite goal in mind? The goal could be contested; Izya could be declared a psycho and a crank (which, of course, he was)… But working like this, stone after stone, Andrei could lay out, as evenly as possible, the platform for a foundation.
Izya panted and grunted beside him, rolling the largest stones, stumbled, and tore the sole completely off his shoe, and when the foundation was ready, he galloped to his cart and extracted another copy of his Guidebook from under the rags.
When, at the Crystal Palace, they had finally realized and almost believed that they would never meet anyone again on the journey north, Izya had sat down at a typewriter and dashed off at supernatural speed A Guidebook to the Crazy World. Then he had personally reproduced this Guidebook on a bizarre copying machine (in the Crystal Palace they had all sorts of different amazing machines); he had personally sealed all fifty copies in envelopes of a strange, transparent, and very strong material that was called “polyethylene film” and loaded up his cart right to the top, leaving only just enough room for a sack of rusks… And now he only had about ten, or maybe even fewer, of these envelopes left.
“How many of them do you still have?” asked Andrei.
Setting an envelope at the center of the foundation, Izya replied absentmindedly, “Damned if I know… Not many. Give me some stones.”
Again they started dragging stones, and soon a pyramid a meter and a half tall had sprung up over the envelope. It looked rather strange in this desolate landscape, but to make it look even stranger still, Izya poured poisonous red paint over the stones from a huge tube that he had found in the storeroom under the Tower. Then he moved away to his cart, sat down, and started binding the detached sole of his shoe with a piece of string. While he was doing it, he kept glancing at his pyramid, and the doubt and uncertainty in his face were gradually replaced by a look of satisfaction and burgeoning pride.
“Eh?” he said to Andrei, completely puffed up with conceit at this stage. “Not even an absolute fool would walk past it—he’d realize it had a purpose.”
“Uh-huh,” said Andrei, squatting down beside Izya. “And a fat lot of good it’ll do you when this pyramid is excavated by some absolute fool.”
“Never mind, never mind,” Izya growled. “A fool is a rational creature too. If he doesn’t understand, he’ll tell others about it…” He suddenly brightened up. “Take myths, for instance! As we know, fools are the overwhelming majority, which means that the witness to any interesting event has generally been a fool. Ergo: a myth is a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. Eh?”
Andrei didn’t answer. He was looking at the pyramid. The wind cautiously crept up to it, uncertainly stirred the dust around it, whistled feebly between the stones, and Andrei suddenly pictured very clearly to himself the countless numbers of kilometers left behind them, and the thin dotted line of pyramids like this, stretching across those kilometers, abandoned to the wind and to time… And he also pictured a traveler, almost a desiccated mummy, crawling up to this pyramid on his hands and knees, dying of hunger and thirst… how frantically, straining every last ounce of strength, he tugs out these stones and thrusts them aside, breaking his nails, and his inflamed imagination is already painting him a picture of a secret cache of food and water, there under the stones… Andrei let out a hysterical snigger. At that moment I’d definitely shoot myself. It’s not possible to survive something like that…
“What’s wrong with you?” Izya asked suspiciously.
“Nothing, nothing, everything’s fine,” Andrei said, and got up.
Izya got up too, and looked at the pyramid critically for a while. “There’s nothing funny about it!” he declared, and stamped the foot that was bound with shaggy string. “It will do for a start,” he declared. “Shall we go?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
Andrei harnessed himself to his cart, but Izya couldn’t resist the temptation and walked around his pyramid once again. He was obviously imagining something, pictures of some kind, and these pictures were flattering to his inner spirit; he smiled stealthily, rubbing his hands together and panting noisily into his beard.
“Well, you’re a real sight!” Andrei said, unable to stop himself. “Just like a toad. You’ve dumped a load of eggs, and now you’re totally stupefied with pride. Or like a keta salmon.”
“You watch your mouth!” said Izya, threading his arms into the harness. “The keta dies after that business.”
“Precisely,” said Andrei.
“So watch your mouth!” Izya said menacingly, and they moved on.
Then Izya suddenly asked, “Have you ever eaten keta?”
“Tons of it,” said Andrei. “D’you know how great it is with vodka? Or on a sandwich with tea… Why?”