Massive Uncle Yura with his faded army tunic gaping wide open and his roll-up cigarette crackling, looked at Andrei morosely; Selma smiled drunkenly, sprawling in an armchair with her legs hoicked up so high that he could see her little bottom in its pink, lacy panties; Kensi looked at him sagely and seriously, and standing beside him was Volodka Dmitriev, tousle-headed and as savagely unshaven as ever; and ensconced on the high, old chair that Seva Barabanov had only just abandoned to set off on his latest and final work assignment was wizen-faced Borka Chistyakov, with his aristocratic aquiline nose, looking as if he were about to ask, “Oh really, why are you bellowing like a sick elephant?”—they were all here, all his nearest and all his dearest, and they were all looking at him, and all differently, and at the same time their gazes all had something in common too, some common attitude toward him. Sympathy? Trust? Pity? No, it wasn’t that, and before he managed to understand what exactly it was, he suddenly spotted among these old, familiar faces someone he didn’t know at all, some Oriental with a yellowish face and slanting eyes—no, not Wang, but some subtle, even elegant Oriental, and he also got the feeling that someone very small was hiding behind this stranger, someone very, very small, dirty and ragged, probably a stray, homeless child…
He got up abruptly, moved the chair back with a scraping sound, and turned away from them all, and after gesturing indefinitely in the direction and for the attention of the Great Strategist, he walked out of the hall, squeezing through between shoulders and stomachs, pushing some people aside, and as if to console him, someone mumbled somewhere close by, “Well, the rules allow it—let him take a moment to think and reflect on things… We just have to stop the clock…”
Absolutely exhausted and soaked in sweat, he managed to reach the landing of the stairway and sat down directly on the carpet, not far from a torridly blazing fireplace. His cap had slipped down over his eyes again, so he didn’t even try to make out what sort of fireplace this was and what sort of people were sitting around the fireplace; he only sensed the soft, dry heat on his wet body that felt as if it had been badly beaten, and saw the half-dried but still sticky blotches on his shoes, and through the cozy crackling of the blazing logs he heard someone telling a story with measured elegance, listening closely to the sound of his own voice.
“…Just imagine—a handsome fellow, shoulders like a barn door, a holder of all three degrees of the Order of Glory—and let me tell you, they didn’t award a full set of those orders to just anybody, they were even rarer than Heroes of the Soviet Union. Well, a fine comrade, an excellent student, and all the rest of it. And yet, let me tell you, he had a certain strange quirk. He would turn up for a party at the pad of some pampered son of a general or marshal, but as soon as everyone paired up and started wandering off, it was out into the hallway, set his cap at a jaunty angle, and bye-bye. At first they thought he must have some abiding love of his own. But no—every now and again the boys would meet him in public places—in Gorky Park, say, or in various different clubs—with these absolute sluts, and always with different ones! I met him like that myself once. I looked—well, what a choice! As ugly as sin, stockings flapping round skinny legs, plastered with makeup—it’s horrible to speak of it… and back then, by the way, there wasn’t any makeup like there is nowadays—the girls used to line their eyebrows with boot blacking, as near as, dammit… Anyway, a glaring mésalliance, as they say. But he didn’t mind. Leading her along arm in arm, spinning her some kind of line, all in due order, and she’s simply melting, she’s proud and ashamed at the same time, happy as a pig in a peach orchard… And then one day at a bachelor get-together, we cornered him: come on, out with it, what is it with these perverted tastes of yours, how can you even walk with those whores without feeling sick, when the very finest beauties are pining for you… And, let me tell you, in the academy we had a Department of Education, a privileged little spot—they only accepted girls from the most illustrious families there… Well, at first he tried to laugh it off, then he gave in and told us something quite amazing. Comrades, he said, I know that I’m blessed with all the appurtenances, so to speak: I’m handsome, with medals, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I know all this about myself, he said, and I’ve received plenty of notes about it too. But there was this thing, he said, that just happened to me. I suddenly saw the misery of our women. Right through the war they never saw a single chink of light, they were starving all the time, they slaved away doing real men’s work—poor and homely, without even the slightest idea of what it’s like to be beautiful and desired. And so, he said, I set myself the goal of giving at least a few of them an experience so bright and vivid that they would have something to remember for the rest of their lives. I meet this streetcar driver, he said, or a worker from the Hammer and Sickle factory, or a miserable little teacher, who couldn’t have counted on any particular happiness even without the war, and now that so many men have been killed, she can’t see any ships at all coming in through the waves. I spend two or three evenings with them, he said, and then I disappear. Of course, when we part, I lie, I say I’m going on a long work assignment or something else that sounds plausible, and they’re left with this bright memory… at least some kind of bright spark in their lives, he said. I don’t know, he said, how it all looks from the viewpoint of high morals, but I have the feeling that by doing this I’m fulfilling at least some tiny little part of our male duty… When he told us all this, we were dumbfounded. Later on, of course, we started arguing, but the whole thing made a quite exceptional impression on us. He disappeared soon afterward, in fact. Back then a lot of us disappeared like that: orders from army command, and in the army you don‘t ask where you’re going and what for… I never saw him again.”
Neither did I, thought Andrei. I never saw him again either. There were two letters—one to our mother, and one to me. And our mother received a notification: “Your son, Sergei Mikhailovich Voronin, died an honorable death while carrying out a combat mission from the army command.” It was in Korea. Under the pink watercolor sky of Korea, where the Great Strategist first tried his strength in a skirmish with American imperialism. He played his great game there, and Seryozha was left there, with his full set of Orders of Glory…
I don’t want it. I don’t want this game. Maybe that’s the way everything has to be; maybe nothing is possible without playing this game. Maybe. Pretty certainly. But I can’t do it… I don’t know how. And I don’t even want to learn… So all right, then, he thought bitterly, it means I’m a poor soldier. Or rather, I’m just a soldier. And no more than a soldier. That selfsame soldier who doesn’t know how to reflect on things, so he has to obey blindly. And I’m not any kind of chess partner or ally of the Great Strategist, but just a tiny little cog in his colossal machine, and my place is not at the table in his inscrutable game but beside Wang, with Uncle Yura, with Selma… I’m a little stellar astronomer of average ability, and if I had managed to prove the existence of some connection between wide double stars and Schilt’s star streams, that would have been a very, very big deal for me. But as for solving great problems and achieving great things…
And at this point he remembered that he was no longer a stellar astronomer, that he was an investigator in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and he had achieved quite a lot: using a specially trained network of agents and distinct investigative procedures to pinpoint this mysterious Red Building and infiltrate it, exposing its sinister secrets and creating all the necessary conditions for the successful elimination of this malignant phenomenon from our life…