“Yes, Andrei, sometimes one even has to resort to this,” he heard a familiar, calm voice say.
Sitting there on the stool where Izya had been sitting only a minute ago, with one leg crossed over the other and his slim white fingers clasped on his knee, gazing at Andrei with a sad, weary expression, was the Mentor. He was nodding gently and the corners of his mouth were dolefully turned down.
“For the sake of the Experiment?” Andrei asked hoarsely.
“For the sake of the Experiment as well,” said the Mentor. “But above all for one’s own sake. There is no way around it. You had to go through this too. We don’t want just any kind of people. We need a special kind of people.”
“What kind?”
“That’s something even we don’t know,” the Mentor said with quiet regret. “We only know the kind of people we don’t need.”
“People like Katzman?”
The Mentor told him yes with just his eyes.
“And people like Ruhmer?”
The Mentor laughed. “People like Ruhmer aren’t people. They’re living weapons, Andrei. By using people like Ruhmer in the name of and for the good of people like Wang, Uncle Yura… you understand?”
“Yes. That’s what I think too. And after all, there isn’t any other way, right?”
“Right. There isn’t any way around it.”
“But what about the Red Building?” Andrei asked.
“We can’t manage without that either. Without that anyone could become like Ruhmer without even realizing. Have you not sensed already that the Red Building is a necessity? Are you really the same as you were this morning?”
“Katzman said the Red Building is the delirious raving of an agitated conscience.”
“Well now, Katzman is smart. I hope you wouldn’t argue with that.”
“Of course not,” said Andrei. “That’s precisely why he’s dangerous.”
Once again the Mentor showed Andrei yes with just his eyes.
“Oh God,” Andrei exclaimed wearily. “If only I could know for certain what the goal of the Experiment is! It’s so easy to get confused, everything’s such a muddle… Me, Heiger, Kensi… Sometimes I think I know what we have in common, but sometimes it’s a kind of blind alley, it’s totally absurd… After all, Heiger is a former fascist, and even now he… Even now I sometimes find him odious—not as an individual, but as a type, as… Or Kensi. He’s something like a social democrat, some kind of pacifist or Tolstoyan… No, I don’t understand.”
“The Experiment is the Experiment,” said the Mentor. “It’s not understanding that is required of you but something quite different.”
“What?”
“If one only knew…”
“But it’s all for the sake of the majority, isn’t it?” Andrei asked, almost in despair.
“Of course,” said the Mentor. “For the sake of the benighted, downtrodden, entirely innocent, ignorant majority…”
“Which must be raised up,” Andrei eagerly put in, “enlightened, and made the master of the Earth! Yes, yes, that I understand. You can go to any lengths for the sake of that…” He paused, agonizingly gathering his scattered thoughts. “And there’s still the Anticity,” he said hesitantly. “And that’s very dangerous, right?”
“Very,” said the Mentor.
“And then, even if I’m not entirely certain about Katzman, I still acted correctly. We have no right to take any risks.”
“Absolutely!” said the Mentor. He was smiling. He was pleased with Andrei; Andrei could sense it. “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who does nothing. It’s not mistakes that are dangerous—passivity is dangerous, specious fastidiousness is dangerous, devotion to the old commandments is dangerous. Where can old commandments lead? Only to the old world.”
“Yes,” Andrei said excitedly. “I understand that very clearly. That’s exactly what we must all take as our foundation. What is the individual? A social unit! A zero without the digit one. It’s not a matter of the individual units but the public good. In the name of the public good we must be willing to lay any burden, no matter how heavy, on our Old Testament consciences, to transgress all written and unwritten laws. We have only one law: the public good.”
The Mentor stood up. “You’re maturing,” he said almost triumphantly. “Slowly, but you are maturing.”
He raised one hand in salutation, walked soundlessly across the room, and disappeared out the door.
For a while Andrei sat there without thinking, leaning against the back of his chair, smoking and watching the bluish smoke slowly eddying around the yellow lamp hanging from the ceiling. He caught himself smiling. He didn’t feel tired anymore; the sleepiness that had tormented him since the evening had disappeared. He felt an urge to act, to work, and felt annoyed at the thought that anytime now he would have to go and sleep for a few hours anyway, in order not to burn out later.
He pulled the phone toward him with an impatient gesture, lifted the receiver, and then remembered that there was no phone in the basement. He got up, locked the safe, checked that the drawers of the desk were locked, and walked out into the corridor.
The corridor was empty, and the police officer on duty was dozing at his little desk. “You’re asleep at your post!” Andrei remarked reproachfully as he walked by.
The building was filled with a resounding silence, as it always was at this time, a few minutes before the sun was switched on. A sleepy cleaning lady was slowly trailing a damp rag across the concrete floor. The windows in the corridors were wide open; the stinking vapors of hundreds of human bodies crept out into the darkness and dispersed as they were displaced by the cold morning air.
With his heels clattering on the slippery iron stairway, Andrei went down into the basement, gestured casually with his hand for the guard who had jumped to his feet to sit back down, and swung open the low iron door.
Fritz Heiger, with no jacket and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, was standing beside the rusty washbasin, whistling a little march that Andrei vaguely knew and rubbing his hairy, rawboned hands with eau de cologne. There was no one else in the room.
“Ah, it’s you,” said Fritz. “That’s good. I was just going to come up to see you… Give me a cigarette, I’ve run out.”
Andrei handed him the pack. Fritz pulled out a cigarette, kneaded it, stuck it in his mouth, and looked at Andrei with a smirk on his face.
“Well,” Andrei asked impatiently.
“Well what?” Fritz lit up and dragged on it with relish. “You were way off the mark. He’s no spy, he’s not even—”
“But how come?” said Andrei, stunned. “What about the file?”
Fritz chortled, squeezing the cigarette into the corner of his large mouth, and splashed out more eau de cologne onto his broad palm.
“Our little Jew is a superhuman womanizer,” he said pedantically. “He had love letters in that file. He was on his way from a woman’s place—he’d quarreled with her and taken back his letters. But he’s scared shitless of that widow of his, so being no fool, as you know very well, he tried to get rid of that file at the first convenient moment. He says he dumped it down a manhole in the road… And that’s a great pity!” Fritz continued even more pedantically. “That file, Citizen Investigator, ought to have been confiscated immediately—it would have made grade-one dirt, and we would have had our little Jew by the short and curlies!” Fritz demonstrated where the short and curlies were. Fresh bruises were visible on his knuckles. “But anyway, he signed a little report of interrogation for us, so at least we got a tuft of wool from our mangy sheep.”