“…And then,” Kensi continued at a leisurely pace, lighting up a cigarette, “he fought for a while in China, somewhere in the south, I think it was, down Canton way. And then he commanded a division that landed on the Philippines, and he was one of the organizers of the famous ‘march of death,’ with five thousand American prisoners of war—sorry, Donald… And then he was sent to Manchuria and appointed head of the Sakhalin fortified region, where, as it happens, in order to preserve secrecy he herded eight thousand Chinese workers into a mine shaft and blew it up—sorry, Wang… And then he was taken prisoner by the Russians, and instead of hanging him or handing him over to the Chinese—which is the same thing—all they did was lock him up for ten years in a concentration camp…”
While Kensi was telling them all this, Andrei had time to clamber up onto the back of the truck, help Donald line up the cans there, raise the sideboard and secure it, jump back down onto the ground, and give Donald a cigarette, and now the three of them were standing in front of Kensi and listening to him: Donald Cooper, long and stooped, in a faded boilersuit—a long face with folds beside the mouth and a sharp chin with a growth of sparse, gray stubble; and Wang, broad and stocky, almost neckless, in an old, neatly darned wadded jacket—a broad, brownish face, little snub nose, affable smile, dark eyes in the cracks of puffy eyelids—and Andrei was suddenly transfixed by a poignant joy at the thought that all these people from different countries, and even from different times, were all here together and all doing one thing of great importance, each at his own post.
“…Now he’s an old man,” Kensi concluded. “And he claims that the best women he ever knew were Russian women. Emigrants in Harbin.” He stopped speaking, dropped his cigarette butt, and painstakingly ground it to dust with the sole of his gleaming ankle boot.
Andrei said, “What kind of Russian is she? ‘Selma’—and ‘Nagel’ too?”
“Yes, she’s Swedish,” said Kensi. “But all the same. The story came to me by association.”
“OK, let’s go,” Donald said, and climbed into the cabin.
“Listen, Kensi,” said Andrei, taking hold of the cabin door. “Who were you before this?”
“An inspector at the foundry, and before that, minister of communal—”
“No, not here, back there.”
“Aah, there? Back there I was literary editor for the journal Hayakawa.”
Donald started the motor and the vintage truck began shaking and rattling, belching out thick clouds of blue smoke.
“Your right sidelight isn’t working!” Kensi shouted.
“It hasn’t worked in all the time we’ve been here,” Andrei responded.
“Then get it fixed! If I see it again, I’ll fine you!”
“They set you on to hound us…”
“What? I can’t hear!”
“I said, catch bandits, not drivers!” Andrei yelled, trying to shout over the clanging and clattering. “What’s our sidelight to you? When are they going to send all you spongers packing?”
“Soon,” Kensi said. “Any time now—it won’t be more than a hundred years!”
Andrei threatened Kensi with his fist, waved good-bye to Wang, and plumped into the seat beside Donald. The truck jerked forward, scraping one side along the wall of the archway, trundled out onto Main Street, and made a sharp turn to the right.
Settling himself more comfortably, so that the spring protruding from the seat wasn’t pricking his backside, Andrei cast a sideways glance at Donald, who was sitting up straight, with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right on the gearshift; his hat was pushed forward over his eyes, his pointed chin was thrust out, and he was driving at top speed. He always drove like that, “at the legal speed limit,” never giving a thought to braking at the frequent potholes in the road, and at every one of those potholes the trash cans in the back bounced heavily, the rusted-through hood rattled, and no matter how hard Andrei tried to brace himself with his legs, he flew up in the air and fell back precisely onto the sharp point of that damned spring. Previously, however, all this had been accompanied by good-humored banter, but now Donald didn’t say anything, his thin lips were tightly compressed, and he didn’t look at Andrei at all, which made it seem like there was some kind of malicious premeditation in this routine jolting.
“What’s wrong with you, Don?” Andrei asked eventually. “Got a toothache?”
Donald twitched one shoulder briefly and didn’t answer.
“Really, you haven’t been yourself these last few days. I can see it. Maybe I’ve unintentionally offended you somehow?”
“Drop it, Andrei,” Donald said through his teeth. “Why does it have to be about you?’
And again Andrei fancied that he heard some kind of ill will, even something offensive or insulting, in these words: How could a snotty kid like you offend me, a professor? But then Donald spoke again.
“I meant it when I said you were lucky. You really are someone to be envied. All this just kind of washes right over you. Or passes straight through you. But it runs over me like a steamroller. I haven’t got a single unbroken bone left in me.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand a thing.”
Donald said nothing, screwing up his lips.
Andrei looked at him, glanced vacantly at the road ahead, squinted sideways at Donald again, scratched the back of his head, and said disconcertedly, “Word of honor, I don’t understand a thing. Everything seems to be going fine—”
“That’s why I envy you,” Donald said harshly. “And that’s enough about this. Just don’t take any notice.”
“So how am I supposed to do that?” said Andrei, seriously perturbed now. “How can I not take any notice? We’re all here together… You, me, the guys… friendship is a big word, of course, too big… well then, simply comrades… I, for instance, would tell you if there was something… After all, no one’s going to refuse to help, are they! Well, you tell me—if something happened to me and I asked you for help, would you refuse? You wouldn’t, would you, honestly?”
Donald’s hand lifted off the gearshift and patted Andrei gently on the shoulder. Andrei didn’t say anything. His feelings were brimming over. Everything was fine again, everything was all right. Donald was all right. It was just a fit of the blues. A man can get the blues, can’t he? It was simply that his pride had reared its head. After all, the man was a professor of sociology, and here he was down with the trash cans, and before that he was a loader. Of course, it was unpleasant and galling for him, especially since he had no one to take these grievances to—no one had forced him to come here, and it was embarrassing to complain… It was easily said: Make a good job of anything you’re given to do… Well, all right. Enough of all this. He’d manage.
The old truck was already trundling along over diabase rendered slippery by settled mist, and the buildings on both sides had become lower and more dilapidated, and the lines of streetlamps running along the street had become dimmer and sparser. Ahead of them these lines merged into a blurred, hazy blob. There wasn’t a single soul on the roadway or the sidewalks, and for some reason they didn’t even come across any caretakers; only at the corner of Seventeenth Street, in front of a squat, dumpy hotel best known by its title of “the Bedbug Cage,” was there a cart with a dejected horse, and someone sleeping in the cart, completely bundled up in tarpaulin. It was four o’clock in the morning, the time of the deepest sleep, and not a single window was glowing in the black facades.
A vehicle stuck its nose out of a gateway on the left, up ahead of them. Donald flashed his lights at it and hurtled past, and the vehicle, another garbage truck, pulled out onto the road and tried to overtake them, but it had picked the wrong guys for that. There was no way it could compete with Donald—its headlights glinted in through the rear window for a moment and then it dropped back, hopelessly outrun. They overtook another garbage truck in the Burnt Districts, and just in time, because the cobblestones started immediately after the Burnt Districts, and Donald was obliged to reduce speed anyway so the old rust bucket wouldn’t fall apart.