“Yes,” Paprikaki agreed without any great enthusiasm.
“I’ll tie him up right now and dump him behind the safe!” said Kensi, his teeth glinting in a grin of delight.
“Don’t get carried away, now,” said Andrei. “Tying him up, dumping him… Just lock him in the archive room, there’s no phone in there.”
“That would be coercion,” Paprikaki remarked in a dignified voice.
“And if they arrest you, won’t that be coercion?”
“Well, I’m not actually objecting!” said Paprikaki. “It was just a comment.”
“Go on, Andrei, go on,” Kensi said impatiently. “I’ll see to everything here while you’re gone, don’t worry.”
Andrei got up with a grunt, shambled over to the coat stand, dragging his feet, and took his raincoat. His beret had disappeared, and he searched for it on the floor, among the galoshes forgotten by visitors in the good old days, but failed to find it, swore abruptly, and walked out into the front office. The weedy secretary cast a rapid glance at him with her frightened gray eyes. Scraggy little slut. What was it that her name was?
“I’m going to City Hall,” he said morosely.
Out in the newsroom everything seemed to be carrying on as usual. People yelling on the phone, people perching on the edges of desks writing something, people examining damp photographs and drinking coffee, office boys dashing about with files and documents. The whole area was thick with smoke and littered with trash, and the head of the literary section, a phenomenal ass in a gold pince-nez, a former draftsman from some quasi-state or other like Andorra, was holding forth pompously to a mournful-looking author: “There are places where you’ve tried too hard, places where you lack a sense of measure, where the material has proved too powerful and volatile for you…”
A good kick right on the ass, and again, and again, Andrei thought as he walked by. He suddenly recalled how dear to his heart all this had been only a very short time ago, how new and fascinating! How challenging, necessary, and important it had all seemed… “Boss, just a moment,” shouted Denny Lee, the head of the letters department, all set to dash after him, but Andrei just waved him away without even looking back. Right on the ass, and again, and again…
Once outside the door, he stopped and turned up the collar of his raincoat. Carts were still rumbling along the street—and all in the same direction, toward the center of the City, toward City Hall. Andrei thrust his hands as deep into his pockets as he could and set off in the same direction, slouching over. About two minutes later he noticed he was walking along beside a monstrously huge cart with wheels the height of a man. The cart was being drawn along by two gigantic cart horses that were obviously tired after a long journey. He couldn’t see the load in the cart behind the high wooden sides, but he did have a good view of the driver at the front—or, rather, not so much the driver as his colossal tarpaulin raincoat with a three-cornered hood. All Andrei could make out of the driver himself was a beard jutting forward, and through the creaking of the wheels and clatter of hooves, he could hear the driver making incomprehensible sounds of some kind: he was either urging on his horses or releasing excess gas in his simpleminded country manner.
He’s going into the City too, thought Andrei. What for? What do they all want here? They won’t get any bread here, and they don’t need bread anyway—they’ve got bread. They’ve got everything, in fact, not like us city folks. They’ve even got guns. Do they really want to start a massacre? Makhno’s peasant anarchists… Maybe they do. Only what will they get out of it? A chance to pillage the apartments? I don’t understand a thing.
He remembered the interview with the farmers, and how disappointed Kensi had been with it, even though he did it himself, questioning almost fifty peasants on the square in front of City Hall. “What the people think, that’s what we’re for”; “Well, I had a bellyful, you know, sitting out there in the swamps—why don’t I take a trip, I thought…”; “You said it, mister, why are the people all piling in, what for? We’re as surprised as anyone…”; “Well, I see everyone’s going into the City. So I came into the City. I’m as good as the rest, ain’t I?”; “The machine gun? How could I manage without the machine gun? In our parts you can’t set one foot in front of the other without a machine gun…”; “I come out to milk the cows this morning and I see they’re all going. Syomka Kostylin’s going, Jacques-François is going, that… what’s-his-name… ah, darn it, I’m always forgetting what he’s called, lives out beyond Louse Head Hill… He’s going too! I ask, where’re you going, guys? Look here, they say, there’s been no sun for seven days, we ought to pay the City a visit…”; “Well, you ask the bosses that. The bosses know everything”; “They said, didn’t they, they were going to give us automatic tractors! So we could sit at home, scratching our bellies, and it would do the work for us… More than two years now they’ve been promising…”
Evasive, vague, unclear. Ominous. Either they were simply being cunning, or they were all being whisked together in a heap by some kind of instinct, or maybe some kind of secret, well-camouflaged organization… So what was it… peasant insurrection, like the Jacquerie? Maybe like the Tambov partisan army? In some ways he could understand them: there hadn’t been any sun for twelve days now, the harvest was going to ruin, no one knew what was going to happen. They’d been blown off their warm, comfortable perches…
Andrei passed a short, quiet line of people waiting outside a meat market, then another line outside a bakery. Most of the people standing there were women, and for some reason many of them had white armbands on their sleeves. Of course, Andrei immediately thought of the events of Saint Bartholomew’s Eve—then it occurred to him that it was daytime now, not nighttime; it was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the stores were still closed. Three policemen were standing bunched together on a corner, below the neon sign of the Quisisana Night Café. They looked strange somehow—uncertain, was that it? Andrei slowed down, listening.
“So now what do we do, will they order us in to fight them? Why, there’s twice as many of them.”
“We’ll just go and report: there’s no way through there and that’s it.”
“And he’ll say, ‘How come there’s no way through? You’re the police.’”
“The police—so what? We’re the police, and they’re the militia…”
So there’s some kind of militia now, Andrei thought as he walked on. I don’t know any militia… He passed another line of people and turned onto Main Street. Up ahead he could already see the bright mercury lamps of Central Square, its wide-open space completely filled with something gray that was stirring about, enveloped in steam or smoke, but just then he was stopped.
A big, strapping young man—or, rather, a youth, an overgrown juvenile, wearing a flat peaked cap pulled down right over his eyes, blocked the way and asked in a low voice, “Where are you going, sir?”
The youth held his hands at his sides, with white armbands on both sleeves, and several other men, all very different but also with white armbands, were standing by the wall behind him.
Out of the corner of his eye Andrei noticed that the countryman in the tarpaulin raincoat drove straight on unhindered in his unwieldy cart.
“I’m going to City Hall,” Andrei said when he was forced to stop. “What’s the problem?”
“To City Hall?” the youth repeated loudly, glancing back over his shoulder at his comrades. Two other men detached themselves from the wall and walked up to Andrei.
“Do you mind if I ask what you’re going to City Hall for?” inquired a stocky man with unshaven cheeks, wearing greasy overalls and a helmet with the letters G and M on it. He had a vigorous, muscular face with cold, piercing eyes.