A familiar voice suddenly spoke right in his ear. “Cheers, shit shifters! How’s the Great Experiment going?” It was Izya Katzman, life size and in person—disheveled, fat, grubby, and, as always, offensively cheerful. “Have you heard? There’s a scheme for a final solution to the problem of crime. They’re abolishing the police! To replace them they’re going to let the crazies out on the streets at night. It’s the end for the bandits and the hooligans—now only loonies will go outside at nighttime!”
“Cretinous,” Andrei said frostily.
“Cretinous?” Izya stood on the running board and stuck his head into the cabin. “On the contrary! Most ingenious! No additional expenditure. Returning the insane to their permanent places of residence is the responsibility of the caretakers—”
“For which the caretakers are issued supplementary rations in the form of one liter of vodka,” Andrei butted in, which sent Izya into inexplicable raptures: he started giggling, making strange, guttural sounds, spraying saliva, and washing his hands with air.
Donald suddenly swore in a hollow voice, swung open his door, jumped down, and disappeared into the darkness. Izya immediately stopped giggling and asked uneasily, “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” Andrei said morosely. “Probably you made him want to puke… But actually, he’s been that way for a few days already.”
“Really?” Izya looked over the top of the cabin in the direction that Donald had gone. “A shame. He’s a good man. Only really badly maladapted.”
“So who’s well adapted?”
“I’m well adapted. You’re well adapted. Wang’s well adapted… Donald’s been getting indignant with everything just lately: Why do we have to stand in line to dump garbage? Why the hell is there a tallyman here? What’s he tallying?”
“Well, he’s right to feel outraged,” said Andrei. “It really is kind of cretinous.”
“But you don’t get all steamed up about it, do you?” Izya objected. “You realize perfectly well that the tallyman isn’t his own master. They’ve put him there to tally, so he tallies. And since he can’t keep up with his tallying, as you already know, a line forms. And a line… is a line…” Izya started gurgling and spraying again. “Of course, if Donald was in charge, he’d lay a good road here, with exit ramps for dumping garbage, and he’d transfer that great, muscly hulk of a tallyman to the police, to catch bandits. Or to the front line, to the farmers—”
“So?” Andrei asked impatiently
“What do you mean, ‘So?’ Donald isn’t the boss, is he?”
“So why don’t the bosses do it?”
“Why should they?” Izya exclaimed joyfully. “Think about it! Does the garbage get removed? It does. Does the amount removed get tallied? It does. Systematically? Oh yes. At the end of the month, a report will be presented: this month this many more cans of crap were removed than last month. The minister’s happy, the mayor’s happy, everyone’s happy, and if Donald’s not happy, well, no one forced him to come here—he’s a volunteer!”
The truck in front of them belched out a cloud of blue smoke and moved forward about fifteen meters. Andrei hastily sat behind the wheel and glanced out. Donald was nowhere to be seen. Then he cautiously started up the engine and advanced raggedly for the same distance, with the engine cutting out three times on the way. Izya walked alongside, shying away in alarm when the truck started shuddering. Then he started telling Andrei some story about the Bible, but Andrei didn’t really listen—he was soaking wet after all the strain he’d just been through.
Under the bright lamp they were still clanging garbage cans and the air was thick with obscenities. Something struck the roof of the cabin and bounced off, but Andrei took no notice. Oscar Heidemann walked up to them from behind, with his partner, a black man from Haiti, and asked for a cigarette. Almost invisible in the darkness, the Haitian, whose name was Silva, grinned with his white teeth.
Izya launched into a conversation with them, and for some reason he called Silva a “Tonton Macoute” and questioned Oscar about someone named Thor Heyerdahl. Silva pulled strange faces, made his fingers into eyeglasses, and pretended to fire a burst from an automatic rifle. Izya clutched at his stomach and pretended to be slain on the spot. Andrei didn’t understand a thing, and apparently neither did Oscar; very soon it became clear that he’d been confusing Haiti with Tahiti.
Something skidded across the roof again, and suddenly a massive lump of agglutinated garbage smashed into the hood, shattering into pieces.
“Hey!” Oscar shouted into the darkness. “Stop that!”
Up ahead twenty throats started yelling again, and the intensity of the invective suddenly rose to a stratospheric level. Something was going on. Izya gave a plaintive squeal, clutched at his stomach, and doubled over—this time for real. Andrei opened the door and stuck his head out, and immediately took a hit on it from an empty tin can—it didn’t hurt, but it was very insulting—while Silva ducked down and slipped into the darkness. Andrei gazed around, protecting his head and face.
He couldn’t see anything. A hail of rusty cans, pieces of rotten wood, old bones, and even fragments of bricks was showering down from behind the heaps of garbage on the left. He heard a jangle of breaking glass. A wild bellow of outrage rose up over the column of trucks. “What are those bastards doing over there?” voices yelled, almost in chorus. Engines roared as they started up and headlamps flared. Some trucks started jerking fitfully backward and forward; evidently the drivers were trying to turn them so as to light up the crests of garbage from which whole bricks and empty bottles were now flying down. A few more men, huddled over like Silva, dashed into the darkness.
Andrei noticed in passing that Izya had crouched down beside the back of the truck with a tearstained face and was feeling at his stomach. Then Andrei ducked back into the cabin, grabbed the tire iron from under the seat, and leaped out again. Smash their heads in, the bastards! He could see about a dozen garbage collectors down on all fours, clinging on with their hands as they clambered up the slope in a frenzy. One of the drivers managed to set his truck crossways to the line after all, and the beams of his headlamps lit up a ragged ridge, bristling with fragments of old furniture, frizzy with old clothes and scraps of paper, and glittering with broken glass, and above the ridge the scoop bucket of an excavator, raised high in the air, stood out against the black sky. Something was moving on the scoop bucket, something large and gray, with a silvery sheen. Andrei froze, staring at it, and at that very moment a despairing howl rang out above the babble of voices.
“It’s devils! Devils! Run for your life!”
Immediately men came pouring down the slope, tumbling over and over, on hands and knees, head over heels, raising clouds of dust, in a swirling vortex of torn clothes and tatters of paper. One man, clutching his head in his hands and pulling his elbows in tight to protect it, hurtled past Andrei, still squealing in panic, slipped in a rut, fell, got up again, and ran on, going flat out in the direction of the City. Another, breathing hoarsely, squeezed in between the radiator of Andrei’s truck and the back of the one in front, got stuck there, snagged on something, and started straining to break free, also yelling in a strange voice. Suddenly it turned quieter, with only the engines growling, and then, as sharp as blows from a whiplash, came the crack of shots. Up there on the ridge, in the bluish light of the headlamps, Andrei saw a tall, lean man, standing with his back to the trucks and holding a pistol in both hands, firing again and again at something in the darkness behind the ridge.
He fired five or six times in the total silence, and then from out of the darkness came the inhuman howling of a thousand voices, a baleful, mournful caterwauling, as if twenty thousand March tomcats had all started wailing into megaphones at the same time, and the lean man backed away, lost his footing, flapped his arms awkwardly, and slid down the slope on his back. Andrei also shrank away in anticipation of something absolutely appalling, and he saw the ridge abruptly stir into motion.